Hardly a week goes by in tech policy news without hearing about privacy concerns. At this week’s
Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on facial recognition, Senator Al Franken questioned Facebook’s privacy and public policy manager Rob Sherman on the social site’s capability to deploy facial recognition technology on its network. Last week,
Ars Technica reported that the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has released an Android app that surreptitiously records police stops and sends the videos to legal watchdogs for review.
Privacy is one of the issues that TAP scholars continue to explore in great depth. Recently Professor
Helen Nissenbaum published a paper that looks at the privacy issues arising as court documents transform from paper-based to digital records that are accessible online. Along with co-authors Amanda Conley, Anupam Datta, and Divya Sharma, Professor Nissenbaum’s article, “
Sustaining Privacy and Open Justice in the Transition to Online Court Records: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry” asks why should anyone outside of a court bureaucracy worry about what goes into records and whether they can be accessed via a doorway to the courthouse or a portal on the Web?
From the article’s introduction:
Court records exist at the confluence of two strong currents in liberal democratic societies. One current is the demand for openness. Because records provide an essential window into the functioning of one of the three pillars of government—the courts—citizens are presumed to have a right to inspect them to ensure that courts are exercising their powers not only competently and fairly but also within the limits of their mandate. The other current is privacy. The courts are a stage where many of life’s dramas are performed, where people may be shamed, vindicated, compensated, punished, judged, or exposed. These human dramas are chronicled through court records, which include volumes of information about the various people involved in a given dispute. It is only natural, and to be expected, that the creation and exposure of these accumulated volumes raise privacy concerns.
“Sustaining Privacy and Open Justice in the Transition to Online Court Records” aims to contribute to the debate over what courts ought to do. The conclusion of the authors’ research is that courts have an obligation to rewrite rules governing the creation of, and access to, public court records in light of substantive changes that online access augurs.
Read the full article from the
Maryland Law Review: “
Sustaining Privacy and Open Justice in the Transition to Online Court Records: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry.”
