Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Jonathon Penney, a legal scholar and social scientist who is an associate professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, a research affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a long time research fellow at the Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Penney’s expertise lies at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with strong interdisciplinary and empirical dimensions. From established technologies like the internet and social media to emerging ones like artificial intelligence and machine learning, he aims to understand the legal, ethical, and human rights implications of technology and its role in public and private sector practices such as surveillance, privacy, cybersecurity, disinformation, online abuse, and automated legal enforcement.
In this talk, Penney will explore how rapid technological developments are leading to the automation of legal enforcement, generating serious risks for privacy and human rights. Amidst a lack of guidance for lawmakers and policymakers grappling with these issues, Penney will consider theoretical and empirical research on the social impacts of these technologies, and the shortcomings of typical solutions such as regulation and human oversight. Penney will also discuss new research that attempts to measure the “chill” effects of automated legal enforcement, the implications of these technologies for law, policy, and human rights, and possible solutions and alternatives.
Talk title:
“Chilling effects and the future automated legal enforcement”
Abstract:
Automated legal enforcement has already arrived, but its future and long term impact on critical societal interests remains unclear. A combination of rapidly developing computing technology along with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, facial recognition technology (FRT), and big data are creating new possibilities for the automation of law and legal enforcement. But such applications—like AI and FRT powered surveillance and detection or personalized algorithmic legal enforcement at mass scale—create serious risks for privacy and human rights. In particular, scholars and activists have raised concerns that these technologies and applications can have far reaching chilling effects—they will chill or deter people from speaking, behaving, and living freely, out of fear of legal or privacy harms—with disproportionate impacts on more marginalized communities. Yet, there remains a serious lack of guidance in the literature for lawmakers and policymakers grappling with these issues, and a dearth of systematic research on the impact or “chill” of automated law. Drawing on new theoretical insights and empirical research, I argue that while concerns about FRT and other mass surveillance technologies have often dominated media and public policy discourse and debates, the greater risk for chilling effects, and by extension privacy, autonomy, and equality, stems from more personalized and targeted forms of automated legal enforcement. Furthermore, the reasons why this is the case—understanding the social dimensions of chilling effects and automated legal systems—also render the typical law and policy solutions to these problems—like regulation or human oversight—less effective. Along the way, I discuss new research that attempts to measure the chill of form automated legal enforcement today, while testing solutions for tomorrow. The implications for law, policy, and human rights, and alternative legal and technological responses, are also discussed.
About Jonathon Penney
Jonathon Penney is a legal scholar and social scientist who does research at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights. Penney is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, a long-time faculty associate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and a research fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Penney is also a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media, has spent time as a senior research fellow on the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and is a research affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Penney studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford as a Mackenzie King Travelling Scholar. He holds a doctorate in “Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences” from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). His work aims to understand technology’s role in censorship, surveillance, legal enforcement, online abuse, and other public and private sector legal and regulatory contexts, in particular the impact on human rights. His doctoral research, for example, explored how social, corporate, and regulatory activities contribute to chilling effects online through a series of empirical legal case studies like how online surveillance impacts or “chills” people activities online.
Penney’s work has received national and international attention and press coverage, including the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, NBC News, Forbes, Psychology Today, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Freitag, Il Fatto Quotidiano, The Times of India, Indian Express, Jerusalem Post, Russia Today, Huffington Post, Politico, Slate, Motherboard, The Hill, The Index on Censorship, as well as coverage by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Jonathon Penney