Research
Government Surveillance
What information are police and national security officials legally permitted to collect and about whom? What information should they be able to collect as a matter of ethics and policy? How can and should government surveillance be regulated in a democratic society?
Commercial Profiling
What are private companies doing with the data trails individuals leave behind their activities online? When is behavioral advertising a beneficial form of personalization and when is it privacy-invasive or discriminatory? How should law and policy be designed to serve society's needs and values?
Security, Privacy, and Engineering
How are privacy and security matters addressed using technology? What do computer scientists, practitioners, and policy makers see as the role that technology can play in addressing matters of privacy and security? How do these interact with policy concepts like "regulation by design"? What are ways to organize the delegation of security and privacy matters to engineers in an accountable and responsible manner?
European Data Privacy
European laws about data protection have evolved very differently than American approaches. How might we implement a "right to be forgotten" online? What alternative approaches exist?
Social and Organizational Monitoring
Surveillance has become an everyday phenomenon — within workplaces, schools, families, and friendships. How do interpersonal and organizational monitoring change social relationships and power dynamics? How do they interact with social values like risk, discretion, and trust?
Privacy Theory
Privacy laws are underpinned by several, often conflicting, theories. Is privacy an end in itself, or only a means towards safeguarding other values? What functions does privacy serve for the individual and societally? How should conceptual issues be settled when advancing new laws?
Privacy and Data Protection
The rights to privacy and data protection are about the flow of personal information. Our approach to privacy research spans commercial, governmental, and organizational surveillance. Beyond research about law and policy, we engage with topics from security and privacy engineering, as well as foundational theory. Our work covers both United States and European legal systems, often drawing comparisons between them and other jurisdictions.
Law and Complexity
At the Information Law Institute, we are pioneering research at the interface of law and complexity. We apply the methods and tools of complexity science, including agent based modeling, network science, and dynamic systems analysis, to the design of specific legal rules and general legal policies. This work has applications in areas such as innovation, racial segregation, network economics, commons governance, the legal system, public health and epidemics, and adaptive regulatory design.
AI and Agency Law
AI is now a part of everyday life, and “AI agents” operate autonomously in complex domains. Predating these artificial agents by hundreds of years, agency law governs the relationship between a principal and their trusted agent in many domains, including health, finance, legal services, and business management. According to agency law, agents owe fiduciary duties of loyalty and care to their principals. We research how AI systems can be compliant with these duties in contexts where they already exist. We also research how expanded fiduciary duties can address longstanding problems with the digital economy, such as conflicts of interests that arise with platforms, and incomplete contracting. This work is both actionable today with current implementations of AI, and a way to manage AI alignment in the long term to forestall catastrophic risks.