Stanford Center for Internet and Society

06/17/2026

New in the California Law Review Online: "On the Right to Obscurity" by Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger. Responding to Sharma, Kadri, and Adler's "Brokering Safety," Hartzog and Selinger make the case for a legally protected right to obscurity, the practical privacy that allows people to live freely and with dignity, grounded in human dignity and capabilities and enforced through a patchwork of rules ranging from targeted remedies for data broker abuse to outright bans on the most dangerous surveillance technologies.

‍Tragically, U.S. privacy law has neglected to address a significant dimension of privacy. While lawmakers and judges have routinely recognized intrusions into our secluded spaces and breaches of our confidentiality and secrecy, they have largely failed to protect our most common yet also our most...

05/20/2026

The TAKE IT DOWN Act took effect yesterday, requiring platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) within 48 hours of a valid request. In a Techdirt post, CIS Affiliate Riana Pfefferkorn argues that while the law has real potential to help victims, it's also ripe for abuse and the only way to know which way it goes is if platforms start including TIDA takedown statistics in their transparency reports. We deserve the data.

Today marks the deadline for online platforms to implement a process for notice-and-takedown of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) under the TAKE IT DOWN Act (TIDA), which became law one year ag…

05/12/2026

Recommended reading for those working at the intersection of law and technology: Daniel Gervais's review of Ryan Calo's Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach (2025), published in Jotwell.

Calo proposes a four-step framework for legal analysis of technology — defining the technology, examining its affordances, surfacing normative assumptions, and identifying legal levers for intervention. His central argument: technology reflects human choices, not inevitable progress, and legal scholarship must engage with it accordingly.

Full review: https://cyber.jotwell.com/a-method-for-the-madness-of-tech-law/

05/06/2026

What are schools legally required to do when a student uses AI to create a deepfake n**e of a classmate? The answer is murkier than it should be.

In the latest episode of The Deepfake Dialogues, CIS Affiliate + Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Policy Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn talks about her policy brief on AI-generated CSAM in schools — covering how schools can respond without re-traumatizing victims, and what the Grok scandal revealed about platform-enabled abuse at scale.

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/githKnAx

Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gRkXFbDJ

Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gu5a7RY7

05/05/2026

California's proposed attorney AI ethics rules would require lawyers to verify AI-cited authorities and stay current on AI risks, but should also address the risk of attorneys being fooled by deepfakes as evidence, writes CIS Affiliate Riana Pfefferkorn

I submitted a comment to the California State Bar's Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct (COPRAC) on its proposed amendments to the attorney ethics rules related to AI. Given the growing epidemic of attorneys submitting AI-tainted filings in court (which I wrote about here l...

04/09/2026

Jen King & Tiffany Saade find that foundation models pose sweeping, underaddressed privacy risks—from scraping personal data during training to exposing sensitive info in outputs and enabling adversarial attacks. Existing frameworks like GDPR fall short, leaving the public reliant on developers. Policymakers must act.

04/09/2026

Jennifer Granick argues society can't survive AI-powered mass criminal enforcement — nearly everyone has broken some law, and records block access to housing, jobs, and licenses. Speaking at a CCA panel on AI and art, she warns against predictive tools mining bank records and social media, urging artists to engage seriously with AI's societal impact.

Art can tell impactful stories of how AI supercharges government power