Data Privacy Seminar: Meg Leta Jones

Meg Leta Jones, associate professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University, will present "The Character of Consent: Cookies Across Legal Cultures."

Abstract: Confronting cookies remains one of the most quintessential technological experiences of daily life. Weary internet travelers click through and dodge billions of cookie notifications around the world each day. This phony performance of privacy based on consent has plagued networked computer communications for decades. How is such a phenomenon explained? How did a technology – originally designed to protect privacy and promote additional functionality – become an essential tool for an invasive and clunky internet? Other accounts describe the contemporary click-through-consent arrangement as the product of a system broken by a flood of digital information: the privacy self-management problem that has resulted in the consent crisis. But this talk will be about a project investigating the cookie through a historical lens with origins earlier than the 1990s beyond Silicon Valley and instead starts its story in the mid-1960s on both sides of the Atlantic. The project tells the story of the familiar technology and its political disputes by focusing on who exactly is supposed to be consenting to what and why. The story is told through the narration of three “Computer Characters”: the Data Subject from data protection law, the Anonymous User from communication privacy law, and the Privacy Consumer from consumer protection law. The story of the cookie becomes a tale of domestic technology policy agendas, the evolution of the global computer industry and its professionals, and the messy entanglement of consumer protection, data protection, and privacy law. The weakness of digital consent is not one of volume, but one of technical convergence and legal conflation.

Meg Leta Jones is an associate professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy, memory, innovation, and automation in digital information and computing technologies. She is also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs program in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab, and visiting faculty at the Brussels Privacy Hub at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Jones' research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology. Her first book, Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten, is about the social, legal, and technical issues surrounding digital oblivion. Her second book project, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy, tells the transatlantic history of digital consent through the lens of the familiar cookie. She is also co-editing a volume called Feminist Cyberlaw that explores how gender, race, sexuality and disability shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. Meg holds a PhD in Technology, Media & Society from the University of Colorado, Engineering and Applied Science (ATLAS) and a JD from the University of Illinois College of Law.

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