A Price to Pay: U.S. Lawmaker Efforts to Regulate Algorithmic and Data-Driven Pricing
“Algorithmic pricing,” “surveillance pricing,” “dynamic pricing”: in states across the U.S., lawmakers are introducing legislation to regulate a range of practices that use large amounts of data and algorithms to routinely inform decisions about the prices and products offered to consumers. These bills—targeting what this analysis collectively calls “data-driven pricing”—follow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s […]
The Curse of Dimensionality: De-identification Challenges in the Sharing of Highly Dimensional Datasets
The 2006 release by AOL of search queries linked to individual users and the re-identification of some of those users is one of the best known privacy disasters in internet history. Less well known is that AOL had released the data to meet intense demand from academic researchers who saw this valuable data set as essential […]
Minding Mindful Machines: AI Agents and Data Protection Considerations
We are now in 2025, the year of AI agents. Leading large language model (LLM) developers (including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) have released early versions of technologies described as “AI agents.” Unlike earlier automated systems and even LLMs, these systems go beyond previous technology by having autonomy over how to achieve complex, multi-step tasks, such as […]