[Wendy Seltzer] Privacy and the Third Party Doctrine: “They Never Metadata They Wouldn’t Seize”
Privacy and the Third Party Doctrine: “They Never Metadata They Wouldn’t Seize”
Wendy Seltzer
Policy Counsel
World Wide Web Consortium
Abstract: We rely on a mix of technology, law, and norms to maintain our privacy, but often misunderstand the limits of each. The challenges are particularly steep online, where we depend on an infrastructure of private third-party services both to publish and to keep private.
Precedent from the 1970s sets an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement for information voluntarily turned over to third parties.
That’s a whole lot of metadata constitutionally up for grabs. This talk will address the limits of privacy in the digital age and steps we can take with tech, norms, and law to reclaim it.
Bio: Wendy Seltzer is Policy Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where she leads the Technology & Society Domain’s focus on privacy, security, and social web standards. As a visiting Fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, she researches openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology; the World Wide Web Foundation, devoted to achieving a world in which all people can use the Web to communicate, collaborate and innovate freely. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and communication.