Ryan Calo

Digital Market Manipulation

Jon Hanson and Douglas Kysar coined the term “market manipulation” in 1999 to describe how companies exploit the cognitive limitations of consumers. Everything costs

App Stores for the Brain : Privacy and Security in Brain-Computer Interfaces

9.99 because consumers see the price as closer to

Augmented reality: hard problems of law and policy

9 than

Algorithms, bots, and political communication in the US 2016 election: The challenge of automated political communication for election law and administration

10. Although widely cited by academics, the concept of market manipulation has had only a modest impact on consumer protection law. This Article demonstrates that the concept of market manipulation is descriptively and theoretically incomplete, and updates the framework for the realities of a marketplace that is mediated by technology. Today’s firms fastidiously study consumers and, increasingly, personalize every aspect of their experience. They can also reach consumers anytime and anywhere, rather than waiting for the consumer to approach the marketplace. These and related trends mean that firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover and even trigger consumer frailty at an individual level.A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore. This Article thus both meaningfully advances the behavioral law and economics literature and harnesses that literature to explore and address an impending sea change in the way firms use data to persuade.

Is the law ready for driverless cars

We believe emerging BCI privacy concerns call for a coordinated response by engineers and neuroscientists, lawyers and ethicists, government and industry. Ideally, devices, algorithms, standards and regulations can be designed to mitigate BCI privacy problems and ethical challenges. The first step towards doing so should be an open discussion between ethicists, legal experts, neuroscientists, and engineers.

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are poised to enter the commercial mainstream. Using an interdisciplinary research team, we describe our vision of AR and explore the unique and difficult problems AR presents for law and policy---including around privacy, free speech, discrimination, and safety.

Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw

ABSTRACT Political communication is the process of putting information, technology, and media in the service of power. Increasingly, political actors are automating such processes, through algorithms that obscure motives and authors yet reach immense networks of people through personal ties among friends and family. Not all political algorithms are used for manipulation and social control however. So what are the primary ways in which algorithmic political communication—organized by automated scripts on social media—may undermine elections in democracies? In the US context, what specific elements of communication policy or election law might regulate the behavior of such “bots,” or the political actors who employ them? First, we describe computational propaganda and define political bots as automated scripts designed to manipulate public opinion. Second, we illustrate how political bots have been used to manipulate public opinion and explain how algorithms are an important new domain of analysis for scholars of political communication. Finally, we demonstrate how political bots are likely to interfere with political communication in the United States by allowing surreptitious campaign coordination, illegally soliciting either contributions or votes, or violating rules on disclosure.

Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving

Yes, with one big exception.

Consumer Subject Review Boards: A Thought Experiment

Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect. Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country. The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data.