Podcast appearances and mentions of Tiffany C Li

In this episode, Tiffany C. Li, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Law and a fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, discusses her article "Privacy in Pandemic: Law, Technology, and Public Health in the Covid-19 Crisis." Li begins by identifying the many ways in which the current pandemic implicates privacy law, from testing and contract tracing to distance learning. She discusses the ways in which the law protects privacy and the ways in which many privacy values aren't fully realized. She explains why AI and other automated approaches may introduce bias issues. And she reflects on why privacy is essential to public health. Li is on Twitter at @tiffanycli.This episode was hosted by Brian L. Frye, Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Frye is on Twitter at @brianlfrye. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tiffany C. Li is an attorney and Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She frequently writes and speaks on the privacy implications of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other technologies. Our discussion is based on her recent paper on the difficulties with getting AI to forget. In this second part, we continue our discussion of GDPR and privacy, and then explore some cutting edge areas of law and technology. Can AI algorithms own their creative efforts? Listen and learn. Guidance for GDPR Right to be Forgotten Cindy Ng We continue our discussion with Tiffany Li who is an attorney and Resident Fellow at Yale Law Schools Information Society Project. In part two, we discuss non-human creators of intellectual property and how it could potentially impact the right to be forgotten, as well as the benefits of multi-disciplinary training where developers take a law class and lawyers take a tech class. Andy Green So do you think the regulators will have some more guidance specifically for the GDPR right to be forgotten? Tiffany Li The European regulators typically have been fairly good about providing external guidance outside of regulations and outside of decisions. Guidance documents that are non-binding have very helpful in understanding different aspects of regulation. And I think that we will have more research done. I would love to really see though is more interdisciplinary research. So one problem I think that we have in law generally, in technology law, is the sort of habit of operating in a law and policy only silo. So we have the lawyers, we have the policymakers, we have the lobbyists, everyone there in a room talking about, for example, how we should protect privacy. And that's wonderful and I've been in that room many times. But what's missing often is someone who actually knows what that means on the technical end. For example, all the issues that I just brought up are not in that room with the lawyers and policymakers really, unless you bring in someone with a tech background, someone who works on these issues and actually knows what's going on. So this is something that's not just an issue with the right to be forgotten or just with EU privacy law, but really any technology law or policy issue. I think that we definitely need to bridge that gap between technologists and policymakers. AI and Intellectual Property Cindy Ng Speaking of interdisciplinary, you recently wrote a really interesting paper on AI and intellectual property, and you describe the future dilemmas of what might arise in IP law specifically involving works by non-human creators. And I was wondering if you can introduce to our listeners the significance of your inquiry. Tiffany Li So this is a draft paper that I've been writing about AI and intellectual property. Specifically, I'm looking at the copyright ability of works that are created by non-human authors, which could include AI, but could also include animals for example, or other non-human actors. Getting back to that same difference I mentioned earlier where we have one from an AI that is simply machine learning and super advanced statistics, and we have one from an AI that may be something close to a new type of intelligence. So my paper looks at this from two angles. First, we look what current scholarship says about who should own creative works that are created by AI or non-humans. And here we have an interesting issue. For example, if you devise an AI system to compose music, which we've seen in a few different cases, the question then is who you should own the copyright or the IP rights generally over the music that's created? One option is giving it to the designer of the AI system on the theory that they created a system which is the main impetus for the work being generated in the first place. Another theory is that the person actually running the system, the person who literally flipped the switch and hit run should own the rights because they were provided the creative spark behind the art or the creative work. So other theories prevail or exists right now. Some people say that there should be no rights to any of the work because it doesn't make sense to provide rights who are not the actual creators of the work. Others say that we should try to figure out a system for giving the AI the work. And this of course is problematic because AI can't own anything. And even if it could, even if we get the world where AI is a sentient being, we don't really know what they want. We can't pay them. We don't know how they would prefer to be incentivized for their creation, and so on. So a lot of these different theories don't perfectly match up with reality. But I think the prevailing ideas right now are either to create a contractual basis for figuring this out. For example, when you design your system, you signed a contract with whoever you sell it to, that lays out all the rights neatly in the contract so you bypass a legal issue entirely. Or think of it as a work-for-hire model. Think of the AI system as now just an employee who is simply following the instructions of an employer. In that sense for example, if you are an employee of Google and you develop something, you develop a really great product, you don't own the product, Google owns that product, right? It's under the work-for-hire model. So that's one theory. And what my research is finding is that none of these theories really makes sense because we're missing one crucial thing. And I think the crucial point they're missing is really goes back to the very beginnings of why we have copyright in the first place, or why we have intellectual property, which is that we want to incentivize the creation of more useful work. We want more artists, we want more musicians, and so on. So the key question then if you look at works created by non-humans isn't, you know, if we can contractually get around this issue, the key question is what we want to incentivize. Whether we want to incentivize work in general, art in general, or if for some reason we think that there's something unique about human creation, that we want humans to continually be creating things, and those two different paradigms I think should be the way we look at this issue in the future. So it's a little high level but I think that that's interesting distinction that we haven't paid enough attention to yet when we think about the question of who should own intellectual properties for works that are created AI and non-humans generally. Andy Green If we give AIs some of these rights, then it almost conflicts with the right to be forgotten because now you would need the consent of the AI? Tiffany Li Sure. That's definitely possible. We don't know. I mean, we don't have AI citizens yet except in Saudi Arabia. Andy Green I've heard about that, yeah. Cindy Ng So since we're talking about AI citizens, if we do extend AI citizens to have intellectual property rights, does it mean that they get other kinds of rights? Such as freedom of speech and the right to vote, or that's not a proper approach or way to think about it? Are we treading in science fiction movies that we've been where humans are superior to a machine? I know we're just kind of playing around with ideas, but it will be really interesting to hear your insights especially... It's your specialty. Tiffany Li No problem. I mean, I'm in this field because I love playing around with those ideas. Even though I do continually mention that there is that division between the AI we have now and that futuristic sentient AI, I do think that eventually we will get there. There will be a point where we have AI that can think, for a certain definition of thinking, that can think at least like level human beings. And because those intelligent systems can design themselves, it's fairly easy to assume that they will then design even more intelligent systems. And we'll get to that point where there will be super intelligent AIs who are more intelligent than humans. So the question they ask then I think is really interesting. It's the concept of whether we should be giving these potential future beings the same rights that we give human beings. And I think that's interesting because it gets down to a really a philosophical question, right? It's not a question about privacy or security or even law. It's the question of what we believe is important on a moral level, and it's who we believe to be capable of either having morals or being part of a moral calculus. So in my personal opinion, I believe if we do get to that point, if there are artificially intelligent beings who are as intelligent as humans, who we believe to be almost exactly the same as humans in every way in terms of having intelligence, being able to mimic or feel emotion, and so on, we should definitely look into expanding our definition of citizenship and fundamental rights. I think, of course, there is the opposite view, which is that there is something inherently unique about humanity and there's something unique about life as we see it right now, biological, carbon based life as we see it right now. But I think that's a limited view and I think that that limited view is not something that really serves us well if you consider the universe as a whole and the large expanse of time outside of just these few millennia that humans have been on this earth. Multidisciplinary Training Cindy Ng And to wrap up and to bring all our topics together, I wanna bring it back to regulations and technology and training and I'd like to continue our play thinking with the idea that developers who create technology, if we should require training so that they take principle such as right to be forgotten, privacy by design, and you even mentioned the moral obligation for developers to consider all of these elements because what they'll be creating will ultimately impact humans. And I wonder if they could get  the training that we require of doctors and lawyers so that everyone is working from the same knowledge base. Could you see that happening? And I wanted to know what your opinions are on this. Tiffany Li I love that mode of thought. I think that in addition to lawyers and policymakers needing to understand more from technologists, I think that people working in tech definitely should think more about these ethical issues. And I think that it's starting, we're starting to see a trend of people in the technology community thinking about really how their actions can affect the world at large. And there may be partially in the mainstream news right now because of the reaction to the last election and to ideas such as fake news and disinformation and so on. But we see the tech industry changing and we're accepting somewhat the idea that maybe they should be responsibility or ethical considerations built into the role of being a technologist. So what I like to think about it's just the fact that regardless of whether you are a product developer or you are a privacy officer or you're a lawyer at a tech company per se, for example, regardless of what role you have every action that you make have an impact in the world at large. And this is something that, you know, maybe is giving too much moral responsibility to the day to day actions of most people. But if you consider that any small action within a company can affect the product, and any product can then affect all the users that it reaches, you kind of see this easy scaling up of your one action to effect on the people around you, which can then affect maybe even larger areas and possibly the world. Which is not to say, of course, that we should live in fear of having to the decide every single aspect of our lives based on greater impact the world. But I do think it's important to remember that especially if you are in a role in which you're dealing with things that might have really direct impact on things that matter, like privacy, like free speech, like global idealistic human rights values, and so on. I think it's important to consider ethics and technology definitely. And if we can provide training, if we can make this part of the product design process, if we can make this part of what we expect when hiring people, sure. I think it would be great. Adding it to curriculum, adding tech or information ethics course into the general computer science curriculum for example would be great. I also think that it would be great to have a tech course for the law school curriculum as well. Definitely both sides can learn from each other. We do in general just need to bridge that gap. Cindy Ng So I just wanted to ask if you had anything else that you wanted to share that we didn't cover? We covered so many different topics. Tiffany Li So I'd love to take a moment to introduce the work that I'm currently doing. I'm a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project, which is a research center dedicated to different legal issues involving the information society as we know it. I'm currently leading a new initiative which is called the Wikimedia and Yale Law School Initiative on intermediaries and information. This initiative is funded by a generous grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia. And we're doing some really interesting research right now on exactly what we just discussed on the role of tech companies, but particularly these information intermediaries or these social media platforms and so on. These tech companies and their responsibilities or their duties, towards users, towards movements, towards governments, and possibly towards the world and larger ideals. So it's a really interesting new initiative and I would definitely welcome different feedback and ideas on these topics. So if people want to check out more information, you can head to our website. It's law.yale.edu/isp. And you can also follow me on twitter @Tiffany, T-I-F-F-A-N-Y-C-L-I. So I would love to hear from any of your listeners and love to chat more about all of these fascinating issues.

Tiffany C. Li is an attorney and Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She frequently writes and speaks on the privacy implications of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other technologies. Our discussion is based on her recent paper on the difficulties with getting AI to forget. In this first part , we talk about the GDPR's "right to be forgotten" rule and the gap between technology and the law. Consumer Versus Business Interests Cindy Ng Tiffany Li is an attorney and resident fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. She is also an expert on privacy, intellectual property, law and policy. In our interview we discuss the legal background in GDPR's right to be forgotten, the hype and promise of artificial intelligence, as well as her paper, "Humans forget, machines remember." The right to be forgotten, it's a core principle in the GDPR, where a consumer can request to have their personal data be removed from the internet. And I was wondering if you can speak to the tension between an individual's right to privacy and a company's business interest. Tiffany Li So the tension between the consumer right to privacy and a company's business interest really happens in many different spaces. Specifically, here we're wrote about the right to be forgotten, which is the concept that an individual should be able to request that data or information about them be deleted from a website or a search engine, for example. Now, there's an obvious tension there between a consumer's rights or desire to have their privacy unstated and the business or the company's business interest in having information out there and also in decreasing the cost for compliance. Before the right to be forgotten in particular, there is that interesting question about whether or not we should be protecting the personal privacy rights of whoever's requesting that their information be deleted, or should we protect this concept that the company should be able to control the information that they provide on their service, as well as a larger conceptual ideal of having free speech and free expression and knowledge out there on the internet. So one argument outside of this consumer versus business tension, one argument really is simply that the right to be forgotten goes against the values of speech and expression, because by requesting that your information or information about you be taken down, you are in some ways silencing someone else's speech. AI and the Right to Be Forgotten Andy Green Right. So, Tiffany, I wanted to  follow up a little bit. I was wondering if you can give some of the legal background behind the GDPR's right to be forgotten, specifically referring to the Spain versus Google case that you mentioned in your paper on AI and the right to be forgotten. Tiffany Li The main important case that we discuss the right to be forgotten is the Spanish case that started in 2010. In that year, a Spanish citizen, along with the Spanish DPA, the Data Protection Agency, sued both the Spanish newspaper as well as Google, the American internet company that is now part of Alphabet. So the Spanish citizen argued that Google infringed on his right to privacy because the Google search results included information related to things that he didn't want to be in the public realm any longer. That's the basic legal framework. Eventually, this case went up to the ECJ, which in 2014 ruled in favor of the Spanish citizen and against Google. Essentially, what they ruled was that the right to be forgotten was something that could be enforced against search engine operators. Now, this wasn't a blanket rule, indicating a few searching conditions. A few conditions have to be met in order for search engine operators to be forced to comply with the right to be forgotten, and there are various exceptions that apply as well. And I think what's interesting really is that even then people were already discussing this tension that we mentioned before. Both the tension between consumer rights and business interests but also the tension between privacy in general and expression and transparency. So it goes all the way back to 2010, and we're still dealing with the ramifications of that decision now. Andy Green Right. So one thing about that decision that maybe a lot of people don't understand is that the Spanish newspaper that originally ran this story still has that content. The court decided, and correct me if I'm wrong, that that had to be still available. It's just that Google's search page results could not show it. Tiffany Li Yes. I think that there have been instances in a few other cases that have had similar past patterns, and there has been discussion of, you know, whether we can actually force newspapers to delete their archives. I know one person mentioned this, and really, what to me is kind of frightening framing that the right to be forgotten, taken to an ultimate endpoint...what essentially mean burning newspaper archives. Especially coming from an American point of view. You know, I'm in the U.S. where free speech is sacrosanct thing. That is incredibly frightening to think about, the idea that any individual could control what's kept as part of the news media and what's kept as part of our history is a little worrisome. And of course, the right to be forgotten has many conditions on it and it's not an ultimate right without, you know, anything protecting all these values we discussed. But I think it should be mentioned that there are consequences, and if we take anything to an extreme, the consequences become, well, extreme. Andy Green Extreme, right. So I'm wondering if you can just explain a little bit about what the right to be forgotten specifically requires of companies. Tiffany Li An interesting distinction that I discussed, my coauthors and I discussed in our paper on the right to be forgotten and artificial intelligence is that the law back in 2010, as well as the law that is upcoming, the GDPR in 2018, the law does not really define what it means to comply with the right to be forgotten. So they mentioned removing records and erasing records, but this isn't really clearly defined in terms of technical aspects, you know, how to actually comply. And it's especially an issue with current databases and with artificial intelligence and big data in general. We don't know if the law means that you have to delete a record, you have to override a record, you have to replace the record with a null value, you have to take away the data file, the data point from the record in general. We don't know what this means. Companies aren't told how to comply. They're just told that they absolutely have to, which is problematic. Cindy Ng So deleting is not just as simple as dragging a file to the trash can or clicking delete. I'd like to pivot to artificial intelligence. There's a lot of excitement and promise of artificial intelligence, and I'm wondering if you can set the stage by highlighting a few benefits and risks and then linking it back to your specific interest in artificial intelligence and the right to be forgotten. Tiffany Li So broadly speaking, I think that artificial intelligence definitely is the way of the future. And I don't wanna over-hype it too much because I know that right now AI is such a buzzword. It's included really in any discussion that anyone has about the future, right? On the other hand, I also don't believe that AI is this, you know, horrible monster that will eventually lead to the end of humanity as some people have put it. I think right now we're dealing with two things. We're dealing with maybe a soft AI. So, advanced machine learning or really what I call AI as being just very advanced statistics, right? We have that kind of artificial intelligence that can train itself, that can learn, that can create better algorithms based on the algorithms that it's programmed with and the data that we give it. We have that from the artificial intelligence. We do not yet have that form of super intelligent AI. We don't have, you know, the Terminator AI. That doesn't exist yet and we're not anywhere close to that. So take a step back a little bit. Get away from that idea of the super intelligent sentient AI who is either a God or a monster, and get back to what AI is right now. Andy Green So Tiffany, in your recent paper on AI and the right to be forgotten, you talk about AI apps as they are now and you describe how it's not so easy to erase something from its memory. Tiffany Li In our paper, we look at a few different case scenarios. I think the first issue to bring up is what I already mentioned, which is simply that there is no definition of deletion. So it's difficult to understand what it means to delete something, which means that in the case of the right to be forgotten, it seems like legislators are treating this as analogous to a human brain, right? We want the right to be forgotten from the public eye and from the minds of people around us. Translating that to machine intelligence though doesn't quite make sense because machines don't remember or forget in the same way that people do. So if you forget something, you can't find a record of it in your brain, you can't think of it in the future. If you want a machine to forget something or an artificial intelligence system, you can do a number of things, as I mentioned. You can override the specific data point, replace it with a null value, delete it from the record, delete it in your system index and so on. So that's one issue, right? There's no definition of what deletion means, so we don't really know what forgetting means. I think another issue, if we take a step back, if we think about machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, you consider any personal information as part of the training data that is used to train an AI system. If your personal information, for example, if you committed a crime and the fact of that crime and your personal information are linked to that crime, and put into an algorithm that determines the likelihood of any human being to become a criminal. So after adding in your data, that AI system then has a slight bias towards believing that people who may be similar to your various data points may be more likely to commit a crime, by a very slight bias. So when that happens, after that, if you request for your data to be removed from the system, we get into kind of a quandary. If we just remove the data record, there's a possibility of affecting the entire system because the training data that the algorithm was trained on is crucial to the development of the algorithm and the development of the AI system. Andy Green Yep. Tiffany Li So there's that first question of, can we even do this? Is this possible? Will this negatively affect these AI systems? Will this actually protect privacy, right? Because if you delete your data on a system that's already been trained on your data, then there may still be a negative effect on you. And the first basic goal of this right to be forgotten might not be accomplished through these means. I know there's a long list of questions, but are a few issues that we're thinking of when we consider it a problem of artificial intelligence in contrast with the right to be forgotten and with privacy in general. There's a lot that hasn't been figured out, which makes it a little problematic that we're legislating before we know really the technical ways to comply to legislation. Andy Green That's really fascinating, how the long-term memory that's embedded in these rules, that it's not so easy to erase once you...

On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss the latest data spill in Silicon Valley: It’s Google this time. And it’s time to talk gadgets again. This week Facebook announced its second foray into the hardware space with the Portal and Portal Plus—essentially a smart display for making video calls, equipped with an AI camera and Amazon Alexa. Meanwhile, Google launched a new smart display called the Google Home Hub, a new tablet that shares a name with the hosts’ employer, and a new phone that’s interesting for both its camera and the AI built in. The hosts are also joined by tech attorney and privacy expert Tiffany C. Li. She teaches a course at Yale about the changing rights to privacy throughout history. They talk to her about what privacy rights we really have, whose interests are served by U.S. privacy law, and the difference between government and corporate surveillance. 19:16 - Interview with Tiffany Li34:45 - Don’t Close My Tabs Don’t Close My Tabs: IPCC Report Bloomberg: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Podcast production by Max Jacobs If Then plugs: You can get updates about what’s coming up next by following us on Twitter @ifthenpod. You can follow Will @WillOremus and April @Aprilaser. If you have a question or comment, you can email us at ifthen@slate.com. If Then is presented by Slate and Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Listen to If Then via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss the latest data spill in Silicon Valley: It’s Google this time. And it’s time to talk gadgets again. This week Facebook announced its second foray into the hardware space with the Portal and Portal Plus—essentially a smart display for making video calls, equipped with an AI camera and Amazon Alexa. Meanwhile, Google launched a new smart display called the Google Home Hub, a new tablet that shares a name with the hosts’ employer, and a new phone that’s interesting for both its camera and the AI built in. The hosts are also joined by tech attorney and privacy expert Tiffany C. Li. She teaches a course at Yale about the changing rights to privacy throughout history. They talk to her about what privacy rights we really have, whose interests are served by U.S. privacy law, and the difference between government and corporate surveillance. 19:16 - Interview with Tiffany Li34:45 - Don’t Close My Tabs Don’t Close My Tabs:  IPCC Report Bloomberg: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Podcast production by Max Jacobs If Then plugs:  You can get updates about what’s coming up next by following us on Twitter @ifthenpod. You can follow Will @WillOremus and April @Aprilaser. If you have a question or comment, you can email us at ifthen@slate.com. If Then is presented by Slate and Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Listen to If Then via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a photographer left his camera equipment out for a group of wild macaques to explore, the monkeys took a series of photos, including selfies. Once the photos were posted publicly, legal disputes arose around who should own the copyrights — the human photographer who engineered the situation, or the macaques who snapped the photos. This unique case raises the increasingly pertinent question as to whether non-humans — whether they be monkeys or artificial intelligence machines — can claim copyrights to their creations. Jon Lovvorn, Lecturer on Law and the Policy Director of Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program, hosts a discussion panel featuring Jeff Kerr, the General Counsel of PETA, which sued on behalf of the monkey, and experts on copyright, cyber law, and intermediary liability issues, as well as Tiffany C. Li of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Christopher T. Bavitz and Kendra Albert of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/monkeyselfie

Tiffany C. Li (@tiffanycli) is an attorney and Resident Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. She is an expert on privacy, intellectual property, and law and policy at the forefront of new technological innovations. Li leads the Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information, where she researches cutting-edge legal issues involving online speech, access to information, and Internet freedom. Additionally, Li is also an Affiliate Scholar at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.