Privacys Blueprint : The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (9780674985100) by Hartzog Woodrow

Author:Hartzog, Woodrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Design as the Means and Instrumentalities of Privacy Violations

Products liability and consumer protection theories can guide lawmakers in holding companies directly liable for their designs. For example, the FTC has developed a “means and instrumentalities” theory of liability for design choices that harm consumers. For example, in DesignerWare—the FTC complaint involving the fake Windows 10 registration screen (see Chapter 1)—the agency alleged that by providing such adversarial spyware, the company DesignerWare “provided the means and instrumentalities for the commission of unfair acts and practices and thus have caused or are likely to cause substantial injury to consumers that cannot be reasonably avoided and is not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”86

In FTC v. Neovi, also known as the Qchex dispute, the FTC asserted a theory of indirect liability against a company that created a check creation and delivery website that, by design, facilitated the creation of fraudulent checks drawn upon people’s bank accounts.87 The FTC has also stated that providing the means and instrumentalities to install spyware and access customers’ personal information was an unfair trade practice.88

Means and instrumentalities theories must be carefully deployed so as not to unfairly punish general-purpose technologies that have mostly legitimate uses. For example, the iPhone can be used to secretly record people, but it would seem extreme to punish Apple for providing the means and instrumentalities for surreptitious surveillance. “Open” platforms that can be adapted for any purpose—like, say, a robot you could run apps on—would also be less culpable under a means and instrumentalities theory because its design choices were not articulable as pernicious.89 Instead, under this theory regulators should look to specific design decisions that nudge people toward unjustified behavior.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.