Report

Safe and Secure VR: Policy Issues Impacting Kids’ Use of Immersive Tech

Safe and Secure VR: Policy Issues Impacting Kids’ Use of Immersive Tech

After Oculus Quest commercials blanketed the airwaves before the holidays, a number of folks at Common Sense Media raised concerns about Facebook’s take on virtual reality. I decided to seize on this interest to offer up some thoughts on how to improve virtual reality for kids, putting out a short paper: Safe and Secure VR: Policy Issues Impacting Kids’ Use of Immersive Tech.

To guide tech companies’ decisions as they create immersive content aimed at kids, I suggest several ways to ensure kids experience these technologies in a safe, secure, and responsible environment, including:

  1. Parental controls should be effective and account for the unique features of VR games, such as its immersive nature. For example, providing clear time-limit mechanisms to prevent overuse.
  2. VR platforms must create safer virtual environments. We need a strong set of standards for rating and moderating VR experiences so families can choose what is appropriate for their children.
  3. Companies must step up their protection of kids’ data, especially because immersive tech like VR requires the collection of so much sensitive behavioral information.

A number of colleagues and VR enthusiasts offered feedback, and I remain thankful to Lindsey Barrett, Mary Berk, Jon Brescia, Jeff Haynes, Girard Kelly, Joe Newman, and Jenny Radesky for their thoughtful feedback — and willingness to read the paper.

// Download the full paper here. 

Congress, What About the Data Brokers?

Congress, What About the Data Brokers?

In light of Congress’ decidedly tech-focused privacy hearings, I thought it important to elevate the surprising absent of data brokers to the conversation:

[D]ata brokers speak of “ethically sourced” data and “enhanced transparency“ through self-regulation. The reality is that while many companies now collect a whole lot of our information, there’s really only one industry that doesn’t want us to know much about it in exchange. Data brokers may know everything about you—but they still don’t want you to know about them.

// Read the piece at Slate here. 

National Security Journalism: From Watchdog to Lapdog

In 2011, as I was wrapping up law school, I wrote a lengthy, ranting paper about the problems watchdog journalism faced in effectively reporting about national security and foreign affairs.  Fueled by a combination of a course on media law, a recent set of disclosures by WikiLeaks, and an unhealthy amount of Sunday morning talk show viewing, I blamed the “systemic professionalization” of our major media for weakening the press’ watchdog function vis-a-vis government.  Specifically, I argued that objectivity in journalism had the unintended consequence of making major media extremely susceptible to having its coverage of foreign affairs and national security issues in general manipulated by outside actors, especially the government.

A combination of cost-cutting and the twenty-four hour news cycle has forced the media to rely on information provided directly from government officials, and this sort of access has become arguably as valuable as rigorous documentation, critical analysis, or investigations. This leads to an outcome where government becomes the arbiter of what news the public gets to learn.  Over time, my thinking was that reliance on government for the story indirectly reduces the press’s credibility. Since government briefings have become notoriously managed and “spun,” the perverse result is that government information is often considered more reliable or more truthful if it given anonymously and off-the-record, which produces the deluge of anonymous sourcing we see in the media today.

It is my belief that one of the key values of a free press is to serve as a check on government action, but when this sort of government access is combined with a slavish devotion to objectivity, it has the unintended consequence of making our watchdog press more a neutral arbiter than an antagonistic body that oversees government behaviors. Cloaked in secrecy, national security issues provide government officials with an opportunity to shape reality as they wish it — as we have seen repeatedly over the last year.  I.F. Stone one famously stated that “every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed,” but how often do our most esteemed journalists dare call a politician’s lie a lie?

In 1947, the Commission on Freedom of the Press suggested that market forces and citizen efforts could be used to improve the media’s watchdog capability.  When I wrote this paper in 2011, I concluded that this casual observation may be more feasible now than six decades ago due the rise of so-called new media. Collaborative journalism is on the rise:

Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers, but freelancers, university faculty members, students, and citizens. Financial support for reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers, but also from foundations, individual philanthropists, academic and government budgets, special interests, and voluntary contributions from readers and viewers. There is increased competition among the different kinds of news gatherers, but there also is more cooperation, a willingness to share resources and reporting with former competitors.

Maybe now the solution is the professionalize the blogosphere?

In any event, doesn’t this entire enterprise of collaborative journalism sound like exactly how this past year’s reporting on NSA surveillance has been carried out?  Glenn Greenwald is, in the best sense of the word, a blogger by tradition, and numerous organizations, from establishment media to ProPublica and independent researchers like Ashkan Soltani, have brought information to the public.  In the coming year, Greenwald has teamed with billionaire Pierre Omidyar to launch First Look Media.

I had largely forgotten about the paper, but considering its the new year, I thought it worth something to share publicly.  Please feel free to read and criticize — that’s what being a watchdog is all about!

Privacy Protections from FISA Court May Not Compute

This is cross-post on the American Constitution Society’s blog.

After the events of the past few weeks, a discussion presented by the American Constitution Center on the search for privacy and security on the Internet posed many questions but few answers. In an article on The Daily Beast, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig has noted that the “Trust us’ does not compute,” but after a contentious, technical discussion of both the NSA’s PRISM program and the cellular metadata orders, a panel of privacy law scholars were forced to concede that “trust us” is today’s status quo when it comes to programmatic government surveillance.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was first passed in 1978, the law was designed to “put the rule of law back into things,” explained Professor Peter Swire, co-chair of the Tracking Protection Working Group at the W3C and the first Chief Counselor for Privacy at OMB. The emergence of the Internet, however, changed everything. Intelligence agencies were faced with a legal framework that could not account for situations where “games like World of Warcraft [could be] a global terrorist communication network,” he said.

But even as communications technology has been made to serve bad actors, it has also ushered in a Golden Age of surveillance. Modern technology today can easily determine an individual’s geolocation, learn about an individual’s closest associates, and connect it all together via vast databases. Within the federal government, without strong champions for civil liberties, the availability of these technologies encouraged government bureaucracy to take advantage of them to the full extent possible. Absent outside pressure from either the Congress or the public, “stasis sets in,” Swire said.

Yet while service providers collect vast amounts of data about individuals, a combination of business practicalities and Fair Information Practice Principles which stress retention limits and data minimization mean that businesses simply do not keep all of their data for very long. As a result, the government has used Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to collect and store as much information as possible in the “digital equivalent of the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones,” said Professor Nathan Sales, who largely defended the government’s efforts at intelligence gathering.

The difficulty is that these sorts of data collection projects present important Fourth Amendment considerations.  In his passionate dissent in the recent Maryland DNA collection case, Justice Antonin Scalia joined three of his liberal colleagues to explain that the Fourth Amendment specifically protects against general searches and demands a particularity requirement.  However, a general search is exactly what an order permitting the collection of anyone and everyone’s cellular metadata appears to be.

Professor Susan Freiwald pointed out that the plain language of Section 215 is incredibly broad.  50 U.S.C. Sec. 1861 permits surveillance wherever “reasonable grounds” exist that surveillance could be “relevant . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities” where any individual, American citizen or otherwise, is “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power.”  According to Freiwald, the plain language of the statute “doesn’t limit government investigations in any meaningful way.” What checks that exist are limited: Congress appears at best half-informed and the ISPs that are hauled before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) have been incentivized not to fight via the carrot of immunity and the stick of contempt sanctions.

“We’re waiting on the courts,” Freiwald said, suggesting that these programs “cannot survive review if the court does its job.”

Professor Sales countered that the FISC was already placing minimization requirements into the its orders, though he conceded he couldn’t know for sure if this was accurate.

Former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner interjected:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced. . . . Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting.

What little we do know about the FISC suggests that it, too, is wary of the government’s behavior.  In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) last fall, the Director of National Intelligence conceded that on at least one occasion the FISC found that the government’s information collection was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, and moreover, that the government’s behavior had “sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”

Unfortunately, the FISC’s full legal opinion remains classified, and the Department of Justice continues to contest its release.  This fact reveals the core challenge facing any sensible debate about the merits of government surveillance: our current understanding rests on incomplete information, from secret court decisions to the “least untruthful” testimony of government officials.

Louis Brandeis, who along with Samuel Warren “invented” the right to privacy in 1890, also wrote that “[s]unlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”  A discussion about the future of privacy online that forces our best privacy scholars to repeatedly profess their ignorance and rests on placing our trust in the government simply does not compute.

 Scroll to top