Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[paul jones <pjones AT metalab.unc.edu>]

 Please feel free to forward this to other potentially interested folks.

Who: Prof. Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University

When: Thursday April 2, at 2 pm
Where: Room 283, 2nd floor, Carroll Hall.


Bio: Daniel J. Solove is a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School.

He received his A.B. in English Literature from Washington University, where he was an early selection for Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. from Yale Law School. At Yale, Professor Solove won the university-wide scholarly writing Field Prize and served as symposium editor of the Yale Law Journal and as an editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Following law school, Professor Solove clerked for The Honorable Stanley Sporkin, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After practicing law as an associate at the firm of Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., Professor Solove began a second clerkship with The Honorable Pamela Ann Rymer, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Solove writes in the areas of information privacy law, cyberspace law, law and literature, jurisprudence, legal pragmatism, and constitutional theory. He teaches information privacy law, criminal procedure, criminal law, and law and literature.

An internationally known expert in privacy law, Solove has been interviewed and quoted by the media in several hundred articles and broadcasts, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and NPR.

Professor Solove is the author of Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press 2008), The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press 2007), The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (NYU Press 2004) and Information Privacy Law (Aspen Publishing, 3rd ed. 2009), among other titles. His book, The Future of Reputation, won the 2007 McGannon Award.

He has written more than 30 articles, which have appeared in many of the leading law reviews, including the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, U. Pennsylvania Law Review, NYU Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and U. Chicago Law Review, among others. He has consulted in high-profile privacy law cases, contributed to amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court, and testified before Congress. He serves on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and he is on the board of the Law and Humanities Institute.

Title: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet

Abstract:  What information about you is available on the Internet? What if it's wrong, humiliating, or true but regrettable? Will it ever go away?

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal _expression_ and communication. But there's a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives — often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false — will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cyber mobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Longstanding notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance among privacy, free speech, and anonymity, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

More information on the spring colloquium series may be found at:

http://www.unc.edu/~smithjes/colloquium/spring2009.html

On Monday April 6 at 3:30 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center - Dan Gillmor author of We the Media

Next (April 9) speaker: Prof. David Ewoldsen, Ohio State.