(yet another) tech law blog

The French data protection authority (CNIL) has formally ordered Clearview AI to delete the thousands of images of French citizens that the company collected without their consent, and in violation of the GDPR.

CNIL deemed the collection and use of biometric data carried out by Clearview AI as without a legal basis and in contravention of the GDPR for not addressing the rights of individuals, including requests for access to their data.

Over the past few years Clearview AI has come under fire for violating similar rights across various jurisdictions, and enabling an unrestricted surveillance culture that violates the right of privacy.

The popularity and usage of health tech rocketed after the pandemic. This due to several factors, including easier access due to syncing with IoT devices such as smart watches, ability to provide constant monitoring of vitals such as blood oxygen levels, and receiving faster results than the traditional healthcare sector, due to hospitals being overburdened with COVID-19 patients. However, there are several problems with over-reliance on IoT devices and health tech. Firstly, the goal of healthcare and the goal of technology are completely opposed. As noted in the video, the healthcare sector aims to meticulously go through the symptoms of a patient and make an informed diagnosis, even if it takes a longer timespan. However, technology is modelled to provide the fastest result, and therefore function on the basis of pre-programmed algorithms with little to no human oversight. This has already created significant problems in the Babylon health app in particular, specifically with the misdiagnosing of chest pain. 

Privacy on the internet is shown as this abstract concept that is detached from the individual; comprising of ‘ones and zeroes’. This characterization of online privacy has long been the basis for its violation to be trivialized and seen as unimportant. This depersonalisation has allowed massive technology conglomerates to argue that a person does not have ownership over their own data, and therefore the same can be sold by data controllers to third parties.

The nature of adoption of online privacy by tech companies on the internet and framing of online privacy by these companies becomes increasingly crucial as the internet evolves. It of paramount importance to acknowledge that the scope and codification of digital privacy is deeply shaped by capitalism and limited by the biases of the programmers. Let me briefly explain this before looking at its harms. The capitalist perspective of assigning value and commodifying data is present in almost every instance of data collection. Most commonly with social media, e-commerce, OTT platform, video streaming and audio streaming companies, privacy and data are the commodities that the users exchange for better quality services, and this commodification normalises the depersonalisation of data from the user. Therefore, when a technology company is required to protect privacy rights of the users, the company does not see it as something requiring protection as a matter of fact, but an exchange between itself and the users. This also makes companies to put the responsibility on the users to protect their data- for example having users scroll through and individually reject each category of cookies that they don’t consent to, but providing a far more direct and accessible option to accept all cookies.

Soon after Meta opened access to their VR platform ‘Horizon Worlds’ to beta testers in December 2021, a beta tester raised a complaint of sexual harassment on the VR platform. The mechanism in place in the VR platform to curb such harassment and the redressal procedure for such instances are not examples of any individual failures in Horizon Worlds but an indicator of systemic problems around privacy.

The in-built mechanism in Horizon Worlds to stop such instances is for the user to turn on the ‘Safe Zone’ feature, which prevents any other user from interacting with the user until the feature is turned off. Additionally, the only redressal for sexual harassment on the platform is to block and report the harasser.

Cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain technology in general, have fundamentally altered the way internet is used. The cryptocurrency market is currently valued at $3 Trillion, and at least $150 Billion of which is from ‘stablecoins’. Traditional cryptocurrencies do not tie their value to an external asset or metric, such as gold or the U.S. Dollar; these are commonly called ‘non-fiat currency’. Stablecoins on the other hand, have their price or value pegged to a fiat currency or exchange-traded commodities. It was recently found that over 50% of global cryptocurrency trade, measured by volume, was in relation to stablecoins.

I assume that this revelation would be equally shocking and disappointing to Satoshi Nakamoto, who published the white paper ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ over 11 years ago, and developed bitcoin and the blockchain technology. It is fairly clear that the conception of decentralised ledger mechanisms and cryptocurrencies were firmly rooted in the failure of the U.S. government and centralised banks in protecting the interests of the general public. The development and growth of bitcoin and blockchain technology is both in the aftermath of and in reaction to the 2008 financial crisis.

Over the past decade, both blockchain technology and its underlying principle of cyberlibertarianism have flourished and grown to change the internet in profound ways. However, the popularity of offshoots such as stablecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has brought into question the efficacy of blockchain technology, and the need to weigh its harms against its supposed benefits.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are seen as better and more reliable investment opportunities than non-fiat cryptocurrencies, but that comes at the cost of transparency. Most stablecoins cannot be independently audited in the way that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin can be. This has enabled traders to not be transparent and deceive investors, ironically similar to the way financial institutions functioned at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. This functioning is directly antithetical to the basis for the creation of cryptocurrencies.

NFTs

Similar to how stablecoins distorted the ideology of both cryptocurrency and centralised currency, NFTs have distorted the value of art. NFTs are unique cryptocurrency tokens, that prove ownership over a digital media, ranging from picture and GIFs to videos and even tweets. The unobstructed growth of its popularity, specifically amongst a subset of internet users, has displayed the biggest harms of blockchain technology. NFTs take the idea behind non-fiat currencies to the furthest extent, by creating an entire economy that is based on trading valueless “art” on a large-scale, all the while ignoring the irreparable ecological ramifications of the same. The carbon footprint of an average NFT is found to be equivalent to more than a month’s worth of electricity for a person living in the EU. That is far too great a harm to gain “ownership” over a tweet.

There have been several instances of DMCA takedowns of content on the internet, in a range of platforms from Twitter to YouTube. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) significantly restricts the use of copyrighted material online, except for the fair use exemptions provided in the same. It has been reported by Google that over 96% of takedown requests for content on their platforms (including YouTube) is in relation to DMCA complaints.

Although the most common DMCA complaints relate to usage of copyrighted music, film, etc., there has been a growth of insidious misuse of DMCA to restrict the freedom of press and freedom of speech of independent journalists and independent news platforms by large corporate media houses.

The recent incident involving NewsLaundry (a small independent news media outlet in India) shows the scope of misuse and the extent to which free speech in news reporting can be effectively censored online. In this particular case, the India Today News Group (a large corporate media house) filed at least 50 DMCA complaints with YouTube in order to take down NewsLaundry videos, although the fair use exemption under the DMCA as well as the Indian Copyright Act protects usage of copyrighted content for news reportage.

The report bombing of DMCA complaints to YouTube resulted in the freezing of NewsLaundry's YouTube channel, even though it is not in violation of DMCA norms. This misuse of DMCA to censor free press and free speech has significant consequences; it creates a chilling effect in independent reportage, and it stokes the fear of reporting on the news coverage of big media houses, thereby reducing the accountability of such media houses.

Aaron Swartz would have turned 35 years old this November. Unfortunately, he died by suicide in 2013. There were many things that weighed on him in his final days, but one that was publicly known was the collective pressure from the U.S. Attorney and the federal government.

Swartz was a proactive activist and computer programmer who constantly fought for open access and copyright reform in the cyberspace. In 2010, he created a computer program that would automatically download millions of articles for JSTOR. Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University, and had a JSTOR account as well as free access to the systems in the MIT campus at the time; he used this access to download millions of academic journal articles on JSTOR with the specific intention to distribute them online in order to be easily accessible to the general public who could not afford to pay the high subscription costs of JSTOR.