Like most lawyers, I’m on Twitter a lot and, like most lawyers, I spend most of my time tweeting in an effort to seem funny. (To say the responses are “mixed” would be to assume that I ever get responses). But occasionally, something will crop up that demands a response more nuanced than 280 characters… Read More
Any decent account of the last 30 years will certainly conclude that the high point of culture was 1990’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. History, philosophy, George Carlin, mylar tracksuits (it was the 90s) — it had everything you need. And, with its long-awaited second sequel coming out this week, I’m sure that if William… Read More
Okay, There’s An App For That. Why? Ho boy. The Iowa Caucuses were…they happened. And they happened in a way that was both completely unprecedented and utterly, exhaustingly predictable. It’s a story line that’s becoming, frankly, a little boring: people use old process, someone decides that an app (or AI) will be better, lots of… Read More
When you’re a lawyer and you write about truth, you’re basically asking to be insulted because….you know….you’re a lawyer. It’s true, some of my fellow legal professionals have occasionally had a less than intimate connection with the truth, but, in general, even the best lawyers squint their eyes and look wary when someone talks about… Read More
There have been dozens of articles and news pieces about the need for “ethics in AI” or “ethical AI.” This (apparently brand new) issue arises from a number of causes, including public concern over facial recognition, the use of automated decisionmaking, and the ongoing public fascination with the darker side of artificial intelligence (see: Black… Read More
Biometric data is information at its most sensitive. Not only do health and physical characteristics carry with them the very concept of our personhood and humanity, they are also often immutable and, therefore, permanently identify us. I can change my email address or my password, and I can even get a new legal name if… Read More
The Boston Dynamics “dogs” have become something of an inside joke around here: any time we want to suggest that an idea, project, or new technology might have worrisome long-term implications, the robotic canines come up in conversation. Much of it has to do with their somewhat surreal, uncanny valley look, something familiar enough to… Read More
What Zork can teach us about Google, Amazon, and Apple’s Commitment to Data Privacy. Data Privacy gets a lot of lip service these days. We have Apple declaring that they bake privacy into every product, Google deciding to delete millions of Google+ accounts (there were millions?) because of a coding bug that potentially exposed private… Read More
This week I completed a book by Shoshana Zuboff that my brother, James, had pointed me toward. I had also recently completed two other books that have been on my list for quite some time. The timing of each of these books and their futurist warning, deep research, and outstanding storytelling caused a flurry of… Read More
One of the questions we hear most frequently is “what are we doing wrong?” We almost always try to flip that question around into “what can we do better,” because we’re big believers in the notion that providing goals, rather than chastising, creates the right kind of mindset about data privacy and managing a data… Read More
We’ve always loved Venn diagrams. They have a simple way of illuminating potential connections, overlaps, and combinations. They also can be quite funny. Sometimes Venn diagrams show obvious relationships, but other times, they can be used to highlight an odd overlap from seemingly unrelated stories or concepts. This last week, three stories and articles came… Read More
Privacy is an interesting concept, one that both intrigues and baffles us, teasing us with seemingly unanswerable questions. What does it mean to have privacy, or is it even a commodity capable of possession? Is it simply the “right to be let alone,” as Warren and Brandeis wrote in their famous Harvard Law Review Article… Read More
Now that it’s January and everyone is finally returning to the reality where things don’t always taste like peppermint or eggnog (or both, which is just….no), it’s a good time to think about how you’re going to approach 2019. This time of year is rife with predictions and, more often, guesses about what privacy, tech,… Read More
It should be clear by now that we are most comfortable expressing our thoughts in the form of movie quotes, falling as we do into that demographic of Americans who believe that if you can’t say it with a gif from an 80s movie, you don’t need to say it at all. Really, it works… Read More
Yext throws probably the most compelling conference in digital knowledge. Heck, it’s probably the best conference in New York this year. With headliners like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Hannah Fry, and David Blaine, there was some solid star power that captured the essence of the conference: Knowledge is Power. On day two, we had the opportunity… Read More
The opportunities for Artificial Intelligence to transform humanity are enormous. We are seriously excited. However, there are issues with amassing the amount of data necessary for these machine learning based solutions. To become “intelligent” (whether artificially or not) requires immense data and knowledge, and the ability to recall that knowledge. Data Minimization, as a concept,… Read More
The demonstration of Google Duplex has both stunned and terrified the world. AI can do that. For some legal insights into this, check out Jay Ward’s discussion on his blog post here. If you haven’t watched the video yet, its worth the few minutes to understand what all the commotion is about. We play the… Read More
The world is waking up this morning and realizing that Google is much further toward a conversational AI than we thought. To be honest, I was very surprised by the advancement in their demonstration of Google Duplex: