Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom by Joshua A. T. Fairfield

Author:Joshua A. T. Fairfield [Fairfield, Joshua A. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Law, Intellectual Property, General, Property
ISBN: 9781316612200
Google: TdQoDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1316612201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-07-10T06:00:00+00:00

Protecting the Smart Home

Just as personal property must receive increased protection because of the increased amount of intimate detail it can hold, so the legal rules that contemplate the home as a last line of defense and a bastion of privacy must be updated, or risk their relevance. Homes, especially smart homes, are now less information-protective spaces and more information-generative spaces. The home will soon lose any natural ability to restrict data flows. Whereas before data could flow only out of windows and open doors, soon data will flow out of the home through every appliance, device, thermostat, console, power socket, and light fixture.

Recall the now-discredited idea in Olmstead that once data leaves the home, it is fair game for warrantless search. Consider the dissents in Kyllo – which argued that gathering heat data off the house wall was fine – or Jardines – which argued that sending dogs (and thereby drones) up onto citizens’ front porches to sniff for drugs was not an invasion of the home. These are all the same kind of thinking: once data are “in the wild,” once it leaves in any way the walls of the home, it is not protected from government or corporate rummaging. If that becomes the rule, we will live in the digital equivalent of glass-walled houses.

Home as locus-of-information-generation must trump home as means-of-information-protection. We must find rules that protect the information-generative functions of homes by protecting the information they produce, and reduce our reliance on rules which imply that the ability to gather information (whether because it exits the home on wafting air particles, as heat seeping through walls, or carried by Wi-Fi signals or smartgrid wires) implies the right to gather that information.

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