October 6th Event: "Owned: How the Internet of Things Took Our Property and Privacy"
FPF’s Capital-Area Academic Network invites you to join us for a discussion of:
“Owned: How the Internet of Things Took Our
Property and Privacy”
Chapter 5: Private Property
with Author Joshua Fairfield
Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law
October 6, 2016; 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Summary
This chapter examines the constantly shifting relationship between property and privacy. It suggests that property can be used as a bulwark, a shield, a floor, and a foundation for privacy. Property law’s characteristics of clarity, robustness, and default exclusion help to fortify privacy rights that are fuzzy and fragile, rights that too often operate only when the consumer has taken costly steps to protect her interests. Property law serves to shore up privacy’s weakest points.
Joshua Fairfield
is an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, specializing in digital property, electronic contract, big data privacy, and virtual communities. He has written on the law and regulation of e-commerce and online contracts and on the application of standard economic models to virtual environments. Professor Fairfield’s current research focuses on big data privacy models and the next generation of legal applications for cryptocurrencies. His articles on protecting consumer interests in an age of mass-market consumer contracting regularly appear in top law and law-and-technology journals, and policy pieces on consumer protection and technology have appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, and the Financial Times, among other outlets. Before entering the law, Professor Fairfield was a technology entrepreneur, serving as the director of research and development for language-learning software company Rosetta Stone.
Professor Fairfield consults with U.S. government agencies, including the White House Office of Technology and the Homeland Security Privacy Office, on national security, privacy, and law enforcement within online communities and as well as on strategies for protecting children online. From 2009 to 2012, he provided privacy and civil liberties oversight for Intelligence Advance Research Project Activity (IARPA) research programs in virtual worlds. In 2012-13 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study trans-Atlantic privacy law at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. He was elected a member of the American Law Institute in 2013.
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Lunch will be served
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Feel free to share this invitation with any of your colleagues who may be interested in attending. This workshop is sponsored by the FPF Capital-Area Academic Network (FPF-CAN) which was created to support networking opportunities for academics and other researchers interested in privacy broadly defined. If you would like to be added to the FPF-CAN mailing list, please email Lauren Smith ([email protected]).
