The Faculty Lounge

Online Symposium on the Law, Ethics & Science of Re-identification Demonstrations

Over the course of the last fifteen or so years, the belief that “de-identification” of personally identifiable information preserves the anonymity of those individuals has been repeatedly called up short by scholars and journalists. It would be difficult to overstate the importance, for privacy law and policy, of the early work of “re-identification scholars,” as I’ll call them. In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) released data on individual hospital visits by state employees in order to aid important research. As Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld assured employees, their data had been “anonymized,” with all obvious identifiers, such as name, address, and Social Security number, removed. But Latanya Sweeney, then an MIT graduate student, wasn’t buying it. When, in 1996, Weld collapsed at a local event and was admitted to the hospital, she set out to show that she could re-identify his GIC entry. For twenty dollars, she purchased the full roll of Cambridge voter-registration records, and by linking the two data sets, which individually were innocuous enough, she was able to re-identify his GIC entry. As privacy law scholar Paul Ohm put it, “In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office.”

Sweeney's demonstration led to important changes in privacy law, especially under HIPAA. But that demonstration was just the beginning. In 2006, the New York Times was able to re-identify one individual (and only one individual)  in a publicly available research dataset of the three-month AOL search history of over 600,000 users. The Times demonstration led to a class-action lawsuit (which settled out of court), an FTC complaint, and soul-searching in Congress. That same year, Netflix began a three-year contest, offering a $1 million prize to whomever could most improve the algorithm by which the company predicts how much a particular user will enjoy a particular movie. To enable the contest, Netflix made publicly available a dataset of the movie ratings of 500,000 of its customers, whose names it replaced with numerical identifiers. In a 2008 paper, Arvind Narayanan, then a graduate student at UT-Austin, along with his advisor, showed that by linking the “anonymized” Netflix prize dataset to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), in which viewers review movies, often under their own names, many Netflix users could be re-identified, revealing information that was suggestive of their political preferences and other potentially sensitive information. (Remarkably, notwithstanding the re-identification demonstration, after awarding the prize in 2009 to a team from AT&T, in 2010, Netflix announced plans for a second contest, which it cancelled only after tussling with a class-action lawsuit (again, settled out of court) and the FTC.) Earlier this year, Yaniv Erlich and colleagues, using a novel technique involving surnames and the Y chromosome, re-identified five men who had participated in the 1000 Genomes Project — an international consortium to place, in an open online database, the sequenced genomes of (as it turns out, 2500) “unidentified” people — who had also participated in a study of Mormon families in Utah.

Most recently, Sweeney and colleagues re-identified participants in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), who are warned of this risk, using the same technique she used to re-identify Weld in 1997. As a scholar of research ethics and regulation — and also a PGP participant — this latest demonstration piqued my interest. Although much has been said about the appropriate legal and policy responses to these demonstrations (my own thoughts are here), there has been very little discussion about the legal and ethical aspects of the demonstrations themselves. As a modest step in filling that gap, I’m pleased to announce an online symposium, to take place the week of May 20^th, that will address both the scientific and policy value of these demonstrations and the legal and ethical issues they raise. I’ll cross-post my own contribution here, but the full symposium will be hosted over at Bill of Health. Participants fill diverse stakeholder roles (data holder, data provider — i.e., research participant, re-identification researcher, privacy scholar, research ethicist) and will, I expect, have a range of perspectives on these questions:

Misha Angrist

Madeleine Ball

Daniel Barth-Jones

Yaniv Erlich

Beau Gunderson

Stephen Wilson

Michelle Meyer

Arvind Narayanan

Paul Ohm

Latanya Sweeney

Jennifer Wagner

I hope readers will join us on May 20.

Trolls

Nice little bit from artist Vi Hart over at Brain Pickings. Taming the Trolls.  A little uncomfortable psychoanalysis in the piece if negative comments get you down (which they do me from time to time). Brain Pickings is a great site and offers lots of wonderful tidbits of interest to academics and non-academics alike -- most of which have nothing to do with trolls and such.

Blackboard versus TWEN

This year I have switched from Blackboard to TWEN as a tool to augment my classroom teaching.  I mainly use these services to post PowerPoint slides, announcements, links to relevant materials and resource materials.  In other words, I use them as a resource rather than relying on them as a teaching tool.  I know some schools have contracts with one or the other service, and some offer professors and students the option of using either.  So I'm trying TWEN this semester.  Lots of people have said to me that they prefer TWEN to Blackboard, but I can't immediately see why.  It is very easy to use, but the newer versions of Blackboard are pretty easy to use too for the purposes of posting information, announcements, resources.  Are there other functionalities that are handled better in one or the other platform?  What are your experiences?

What's the Business Model for MOOC's?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the questions surrounding how major universities hope to profit from participating in Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC's, run by for-profit ventures like Coursera.   The article describes a contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan that lists several methods for turning the MOOC's into money.  The following passage expresses some skepticism:

When I showed the Coursera contract to Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies, he found it "ironic" that major universities are embracing online education when they have been dismissive of earlier efforts by for-profit companies like the University of Phoenix.

"These are two of the most arrogant types of institutions—Silicon Valley companies intersecting with these elite academic programs," he says. "Neither of them considers that anyone else has come to this place before they've arrived. They say, We're here now, so now it's sort of legitimate and for real."

And he argues that the plan relies heavily on all of the money colleges are already spending on professors and facilities. "It's a way to carve out some extra money on the top of the existing program, but it's not an alternative system that is going to solve the cost crisis of higher education," he says. "It's being subsidized by incredibly high-priced education."

Ms. Koller insists that the courses the company is offering differ fundamentally from those at the University of Phoenix. "Their online effort is really traditional teaching mediated by the computer as opposed to using the tech in a fundamental way," she argues. "There's no economies of scale there. What we're doing is one instructor, 50,000 students. This is the way to bend the cost curves."

The comment on economies of scale caught my eye.  On the face of it, that seems plausible -- a MOOC appears to up the productivity ante substantially, moving to astronomical student-faculty ratios.  But what is actually produced in the process?  In other words, what value do the 50,000 students get out of the experience, and how much will they be willing to pay for it?   The article mentions two possibilities:

Coursera's leaders say they are actively pursuing only two of the moneymaking ideas on the list: charging students who pass the courses a small fee for a certificate, and serving as a matchmaker between students looking for jobs and companies seeking qualified employees.

Both of these possibilities, however, threaten to increase the costs of the venture and erode the economies of scale.  For the certificate, Coursera must determine how it will show that someone "passed" a course.  This will require identity verification as well as a credible form of assessment.  For the job matching, Coursera must offer some service on top of a job clearinghouse if it is to add value beyond existing job matching sites.  That is, they presumably want to claim that the MOOC's help identify better potential employees, which adds value to the matching.  But that brings us back to the need for credible assessment.

[As an aside, the above reminds me of the Epic 2020 video, which while compelling in its presentation, never spoke to the question of credible assessment.]

All of this makes me wonder where we are heading, and whether the enthusiasm for MOOC's will ultimately wane.  A Wall Street Journal article from Friday intersected with this thought -- here's the quote that made me think:

"Investors who were excited about social networking have learned just how immature these companies' business models are," said Michael Shinnick, who manages $2.5 billion for Wasatch Advisors of Salt Lake City, Utah, and doesn't own Facebook shares.

Are we back to the jump first, monetize later philosophy, based on a misapplication of network effects, that characterized the tech last bubble?  Or are MOOC's onto something more substantial?

 

 

A Twitter PSA

Twitter is intuitive in most ways, and many of its social norms are not all that different from other forms of social media (for example, don’t be this guy). But there’s one Twitter rule that is not remotely intuitive, yet goes to the heart of the purpose of Twitter and is seemingly unknown to many people who tweet, even those who tweet a lot. Since so many law profs tweet, herewith this brief PSA. I'll return to substantive blogging in short order.

Many, many tweets begin with the @ sign, e.g.:

@SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! [Yay!/Boo!] #ACA

This tweet will show up in the timelines (or Twitter “feeds”) of only those people who follow both you and @SCOTUSblog. That’s presumably not the result you want in this case, since anyone following @SCOTUSblog already knows that they’re reporting the outcome of the ACA case.

If you want your tweet to appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you, all you have to do is begin your tweet with any character other than the @ sign. This is why you’ll see so many tweets beginning with periods that look like typos, e.g.:

. @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #ACA #RobertsIsA[Hero/Traitor]

Of course, this works, too:

Big #ACA news: @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #TheWorldIs[Redeemed/Over]

Once you know about it, this is actually a feature rather than a bug of Twitter. Twitter offers three levels of publicity/privacy, each appropriate to different tweets:

1. Private DMs (direct messages): These are exactly like Facebook’s message feature, i.e., they’re private messages between you and the recipient (and the FDA, if you're an FDA whistleblower or someone who communicates with them, apparently with the approval of FDA counsel).
2. Less public tweets that begin with the @ sign (sometimes called @replies): These will only appear in the timelines of those who follow both the sender and the recipient, so often relatively few people will see them. However, anyone with an internet connection can look at your Twitter profile page, e.g., https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog, which shows every tweet you’ve sent, whether it begins with the @ sign or not.
3. Fully public tweets that don’t begin with the @ sign (tweets, proper): These appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you. In addition, as above, anyone with an internet connection (whether they have a Twitter account or not) can navigate to your profile page and see all of your tweets.

As an aside, when we’re through with the NFIB postmortem and return to discussing the actual law that that case upheld, can we please go back to calling it PPACA, rather than the ACA? Puh-PACK-uh is so much more fun to say.

Faculty Hiring, and the Facebook Question

You are on your law school's faculty appointments committee.  You and your committee colleagues pull several FAR Forms that merit consideration and discussion, perhaps leading to an invitation to interview with your team at the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (memo to self:  block out October 11-13, 2012).

At some point during the recruiting process, your team is likely to request a current c.v., teaching evaluations, a law school transcript, a research agenda, a list of references, copies of scholarship, etc.

Will your team ask for a candidate's Facebook password?

If you are the candidate, how will you respond to such a request?

Some thoughts here.

Democracy Without a First Amendment

One topic I've been asked about a lot lately is how Australian democracy runs smoothly without any clear express constitutional right to free speech.  There is a relatively restricted minor implied right to free speech in the constitution but nothing in writing and nothing like the rights that exist in countries with express rights (including the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. etc).  With thanks to Eric Robinson for bringing this to my attention, Australia is now considering a new government funded regulatory body to oversee the media.  Story here. 

Australia has also been able to regulate things like violent video games and violent or sexually explicit movies much more effectively than countries with stronger constitutional speech protections.  So the question is whether in the age of globalized, converging media and entertainment outlets, how will domestic governments deal with the increased internationalization of information more generally, particularly when domestic governments have such different stances, and powers and reflect different cultural values about the media.

Distance Education: Losing the Thread

I blogged a while back about an online course I have been taking which is purely via distance education (ie no residence requirements, weekends, seminars etc).  There is also no webcasting or videoconferencing so it relies completely on electronic discussion boards, online assessments and .pdf teaching materials.  I mentioned previously that one of the advantages of the course is its anonymity.  As it is not a professional training course, anonymity actually seems to be a good thing and people are not abusing the privilege of working with pseudonyms by writing inflammatory or inappropriate items.  However, one serious downside of this method of teaching (particularly with no instantaneous form of communication with classmates) is that we are completely reliant on discussion threads to communicate with each other.  As such, sometimes one can lose the thread (literally) of an interesting discussion.  It is very hard to keep track of all the discussions threads one may have contributed to, and sometimes a promising conversation gets lost in the shuffle.  I wondered if anyone has experienced better ways of teaching/learning online than use of discussion threads?  Or better ways of organizing discussion threads than merely query by query?  Because the course is international, the discussion thread modality deals really well with the time differences between classmates, but doesn't deal well with organizing discussions.

Malware as Social Network

Several times in recent months I have received emails (often relegated to my spam folders) that appear to be from people I actually know, but which, on further examination, are spam sent from malware on a friend's computer that sends junk emails to everyone in that person's email contact list.  I'm sure many of us have experienced this.  But recently one of the spam emails I received was from a close family friend that I had lost contact with many years ago.  In all due diligence, I emailed him to let him know that he might want to check his computer for malware and, in so doing, I also realized I should send him the news from our family and ask about his.  He apologized for the spam, said he'd check out his computer and continued the personal correspondence.

So now I'm wondering if these malware/spam programs can be considered a new form of "social networking" in the sense that they bring people in touch who would not otherwise have been in touch with each other.  Is malware the new Facebook?

Submission Guide for Online Law Review Supplements

John Marshall law prof Colin Miller (a friend of the blog and an Oscar trivia master) has updated and posted his Submission Guide for Online Law Review Supplements on SSRN.  Here is the link.

Facebook and Ex Parte Communications

Might a witness's post on a judge's Facebook page, wishing the judge a happy birthday, constitute an ex parte communication?  The South Dakota Supreme Court addressed that issue in an opinion handed down this week.  You'll find the opinion here.

(Hat tip:  South Dakota law prof Roger Baron.)

Listservs and New Law Profs

It's that time of year when new law profs are making book selections, pondering recitation and attendance policies, looking forward (with a range of emotions) to the first day of class in August, etc.  We posted some friendly advice for new colleagues last summer.  Here's the link.  And we've touted a primer on law school teaching, which might be quite useful to recent hires.

One of my new entry-level Campbell colleagues asks this question (I'm paraphrasing):  what lawprof listservs are available for the subjects that I'll be teaching?

If you've got suggestions, please drop them in the comments!  Thanks!

Pre-Loaded Audio and Video Players

OK - so I realize I absolutely must spend less time on Amazon and less time trying to find more time to read more books.  But I did find something new on Amazon earlier today and did a little digging.  Apparently, there's a new way of enjoying books and movies via "pre-loaded" digital book and video players.  In other words, you don't buy content and download it to an MP3 device, but rather you buy hardware (a player) pre-loaded with the content you want.  There's a company that sells a whole catalog of audio and video products this way.  But I don't understand the marketing/pricing.  A popular novel costs around $50 to $60 in this format and it's not clear to me whether the device can ever be re-used to play other content or whether you have to buy a new hard copy device for each book (or movie).  If so, this is a pretty expensive pricing model.  Even a hardcover new release book only costs $20 to $30.  So I'm not 100% sure who the market is for these products and whether the manufacturers are pricing themselves out of the market anyway.  With so many models available for listening to and viewing content relatively cheaply and flexibly, it's hard to understand where this one will fit in.

Browsing, Not Buying

Several friends have remarked to me lately about how sad it is to see so many bricks and mortar bookstores going out of business.  It appears that one obvious reason behind this has been the exponential growth of e-publishing businesses.  E-books can be significantly cheaper (although not always) than paper copies, delivery is instant anywhere anytime, books can be read anywhere anytime without having to lug them around in a backpack.  So much for the reading side of the equation.  But what about CHOOSING books to read?  Are e-devices better than physical bookstores for browsing?  I to tend to gravitate towards completely different books depending on whether I'm browsing online or in a bookstore.  I'm often attracted to items in a store that may never show up on a 'recommendations' list on, say, Amazon.  However, like many of us I suspect, if I find something I like in the store I'm probably tempted to just download it to my Kindle rather than purchasing a hard copy.  So is there any economical model under which we could maintain the advantages of bricks and mortar book browsing while retaining the benefits of e-books?  Does it have to be either/or?  Will libraries overtake bookstores as places to browse shelves for new inspiration on what to buy? 

Law Review Articles on Amazon

One of my colleagues recently noticed that a number of law review articles are available for sale (or rather digital download) at amazon.com  An example is here.  She asked me if there were any legal problems with this and I replied that I didn't think so because presumably law reviews will not license the articles to amazon unless they have authority to do so under their publication agreements with the individual authors.  We continued going back and forth on the issue because my colleague was uneasy that someone might be making money commercially from her work in a manner she had not contemplated.  The pricepoint for these downloads from amazon is around $10 per article (or really $9.95 because that sounds so much cheaper).  My assumption was that if individual law review articles are priced that way, it's probably due to the request of the publisher and amazon is probably getting a relatively small cut.  In other words if this is like other electronic downloads that amazon does, amazon can release kindle books much more cheaply when the paper version publisher does not set a particularly high price (or when there is no paper version publisher and the author is engaging in e-publishing direct through amazon).

So, aside from the fact that very few people are probably buying articles from amazon that they could access from other sources more cheaply (or free), if less conveniently, I would assume that it wouldn't be amazon making huge profits from this.  Are the law reviews actually making any money out of it then?  And, if so, how does the pricing of an individual article compare to the pricing of an entire volume of the relevant law review?  And how are journals deciding whether to release material on amazon and, when they do, are they releasing all of their published articles or just select articles that the editors think may appeal to a more general audience?

 

Law Firm Hiring: There's an App for That!

The Benesch law firm has just released an app for iPhones and iPads to notify recent law grads and lawyers potentially interested in lateraling to the firm of upcoming job opportunities.  It will be interesting to see if this mode of recruitment takes off.  And, if it does, will recent grads be downloading multiple apps from multiple firms or will some entrepreneurial aggregator come along and offer a service of aggregating all available law firm jobs and making them available in an app format that notifies potentially interested applicants of job availability?  Is this the future of legal recruiting?

PDAs on Parade...

A colleague asked me if I had any thoughts about the distracting use of PDAs (eg iPhones, iPads, Droids etc) during scholarly presentations.  I must admit I hadn't given it a lot of thought myself, but she had a recent experience in a small group presentation of her work where the entire front row appeared to be tweeting, checking email, blogging, gaming or whatever and she found it distracting and disrespectful to the speaker.  She wondered if it would be appropriate to ask participants at such presentations to avoid using these devices so obviously during a talk.

This is related to our discussions about uses of computers in classes, but it's somewhat different because audience members at talks are obviously a different group of people to students in class and are there for different reasons.  For example, it may be that someone going to a CLE presentation doesn't really want to be there so is happy to be distracted by other matters during the presentation.  However, if the attempt at being distracted is distracting to others (including the speaker), that could be a problem.

Has anyone ever asked people in this setting to put away their PDAs or to avoid conspicuously texting, emailing etc during a presentation?  [And I must admit just last week I was guilty of fidgeting with my Droid during a small committee  meeting much to the chagrin of the committee chair.  I was in fact trying to pull up the committee agenda on my handheld device because I had forgotten to bring a hard copy - but it looked to the chair like I was just rudely ignoring her and checking email or something.  I apologized later, but she still found it as distracting as if I had been texting or checking out my recent baby photos - which, of course, I offered to show her by way of apology at the end of the meeting!]

What's in Your Email Signature?

For a while, I've had colleagues suggest to me that I add a link to my university webpage and/or SSRN page at the bottom of my email signature.  I know many people now do this and some also include links to YouTube videos and other audio-visual materials highlighting their professional work.  I generally haven't included anything in my email signature other than my contact details because I figure anyone who is really that interested in me can easily Google me.  I guess this is because the only thing I ever seem to use other people's email signatures for is if I need their snail mail address to post something to them or their telephone number to call them.  I haven't really felt compelled to click on html links to SSRN pages or personal webpages myself.  So I wondered if others have thoughts on this.  I've been told it's a good advertisement for your school to include an SSRN page link in an email signature, but pretty much everyone has an SSRN page now so unless people are actually clicking on those links to find out what you've written (and where it has been placed and how often you publish etc), does it really serve any significant marketing function?  I mean, it's obviously not a big deal just to include it, but I do get rather annoyed at how long email signatures are getting these days particularly if you are having an email "back and forth" with someone and they haven't defaulted their email settings to not include the signature in a "reply" or "forwarded" message.

And obviously I know you can have more than one email signature and you can attach an appropriate signature for an appropriate audience ie one could use an email signature with a link to published works etc only when sending emails to people who might not otherwise know about SSRN (eg some practitioners who may not themselves post on SSRN) and use a different more streamlined email signature for other purposes.  But who really has the time to change signatures back and forth on a regular basis?

The End of LexOpus

I noticed today that LexOpus (the online submission system that was a little more international and gave a little more flexibility to authors and journals than Expresso) is ceasing operations at the end of May.  Announcement here.  I don't know the background to the decision to stop the service, but would be interested in any info others may have.

Laptop Use in Class: An "Arresting" Development

If you thought a student was using a laptop for other than a class-related purpose, might you be tempted to take action?

A few days ago, one professor did.  His story here.