Future Tense

Future Tense Newsletter: How Courts Tiptoe Around Digital Privacy Decisions

Facebook lost a recent fight to protect user privacy.

Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

Greetings, Future Tensers,

Last week, the New York Court of Appeals had the opportunity to issue a ruling that could have limited law enforcement’s ability to issue dragnet-style warrants for text, photos, videos, and other personal data during criminal investigations. It declined, denying Facebook’s argument that a district attorney’s overbroad request for the contents of 381 accounts violated its users’ privacy rights.

Instead, writes Jill Priluck, the court sidestepped the issue by ruling against the social media company on a narrower jurisdictional question. Many other American courts have conspicuously avoided pivotal privacy decisions involving new technologies, too. The trend isn’t just baffling, she explains, “but also too important to dodge.”

Elsewhere on Future Tense, we’re continuing this month’s Futurography series exploring synthetic biology. Robert Hart wrote about the divide between biotech’s intellectual property proponents and its open-source counterculture warriors.

Other things we read while watching the last 10 years of solar storms:

  • Sounding the alarm: Josephine Wolff writes about a security breach that set off 156 tornado sirens in Dallas last week—and what it can tell us about protecting against more serious infrastructure hacks.
  • Not for nothing: Last week, Taser International (which is now known as Axon) announced that it’s offering U.S. police departments free body cameras. But the giveaway may come at a cost to oversight, writes law professor Elizabeth Joh.
  • Pricey privacy: Nathalie Maréchal explains how cheap digital devices end up make the poor vulnerable to fraud, identity theft, cyberstalking, and other hacking misfortunes.
  • Bursting your bubble: A new study suggests that your filter-bubbled Facebook feed and other digital divides may not be a primary driver of political polarization—yet. Will Oremus delves into the findings.

Tipping my hat to some outstanding untangling of algorithmic injustice,
Kirsten Berg
for Future Tense

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.