Title: “Assessing the Relationship Between Privacy Regulations and Software Development to Improve Rulemaking and Compliance”
Abstract: The advent of the surveillance economy in the modern Internet has significantly transformed understandings of privacy. Governments worldwide have proposed various legislative solutions to encourage responsible behavior by companies handling personally identifiable information. However, the relationship between regulation and software design, and the ultimate efficacy of enforcement paradigms at promoting widespread compliance with data protection standards, are difficult to measure. Our research project, which is funded under the NSF’s “Designing Accountable Software Systems” program, leverages a combined team of legal and engineering experts to provide the first tool to systematically evaluate how privacy laws impact approaches to personally identifiable information in software development, laying the foundation for a new regulatory paradigm based on proactive, rather than reactive, models of enforcement, which rely on mass automated notifications rather than labor-intensive individual enforcement actions. This presentation will focus on the law and policy aspects of the current project, the relationship between privacy, regulation, and the development of new technologies, and the impact of this research on global privacy enforcement structures.
Bio: Michael Karanicolas is the Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology Law & Policy and, as of January 1 2025, will be an associate professor and the James S. Palmer Chair in Law and Public Policy at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. Previously, he was the Wikimedia Fellow at Yale Information Society Project, where he remains an affiliated fellow. Prior to his academic career, Michael spent a decade as a human rights advocate, where he worked to develop legal frameworks supporting foundational rights for democracy. His research encompasses a number of thematic areas, but generally revolves around the application of human rights standards in an online context. Michael has a B.A. (Hons.) from Queen’s University (Dean’s List), an LL.B. from the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University (Dean’s List), and an LL.M. from the University of Toronto. You can find his publications at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=3448585.
Zoom: https://jhuapl.zoomgov.com/j/1614814150?pwd=We2fvlWeBpELua4AExM5aWfI5JzpKk.1&from=addon
Meeting ID: 161 481 4150
Passcode: 846194