Robert Sprague

Electronic Surveillance in the Global Workplace: Laws, Ethics, Research and Practice

This paper considers the legal, ethical and cultural factors that must be addressed in evaluating the appropriateness of employing electronic surveillance (ES) in varying international contexts. It critically evaluates the rationale that underlies the use of ES in a variety of settings and types of organisations. It suggests guidelines for the adoption and use of ES and potential directions for future research.

Automated small business legal counseling systems

The author reviews expert systems currently under development for automating small business legal counseling services. The core of these systems is an automated legal audit, which reviews and analyzes the operational and organizational status of a small business. Such systems would require both forward and backward chaining abilities, both case- and rule-based reasoning, a rich hypertext system, the ability to contact online information systems and to assimilate the information derived, and automated document generation capabilities. Although the systems are still being built, a major feature will be their ability to formulate queries to search and retrieve information from online services and then incorporate such information into their analyses.<<ETX>>

Cloud Privacy: Normative Standards Needed to Foster Innovation

The principal thesis of this comment is that the free flow of personal information that respects privacy can fuel and cultivate innovation. The growth of cloud computing has led to a corresponding growth of user data stored on third party servers. While technology has advanced, privacy protection has been slow to evolve. U.S. privacy law has significant limitations in the protection of aggregated data — precisely the type of a substantial amount of cloud computing data. Privacy laws, regulations, and policies will have to be modernized and improved to instill trust in cloud computing, thus providing a foundation to support its growth and innovation.Portions of this comment are based on a paper presented at the 2010 Intelligent Information Privacy Management Symposium, Stanford University.

At what point does liability hit home

As software developers know, computer programs do not always function as intended. Despite the best efforts of programmers, some errors are inevitable. Software is also susceptible to contamination. A programs operation can be disrupted by programming instructions unknowingly, or intentionally, introduced into the environment. The author discusses the legal responsibilities of software developers when errors occur. >