To App or Not to App? Understanding Public Resistance to COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing and its Criminological Relevance

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact tracing has been developed and promoted in many countries as a valuable tool to help the fight against the virus, allowing health authorities to react quickly and limit contagion. Very often, however, these tracing apps have faced public resistance, making their use relatively sparse and ineffective. Our study relies on an interdisciplinary approach that brings together criminological and computational expertise to consider the key social dynamics underlying people’s resistance to using the NHS contact-tracing app in England and Wales. The present study analyses a large Twitter dataset to investigate interactions between relevant user accounts and identify the main narrative frames (lack of trust and negative liberties) and mechanisms (polluted information, conspiratorial thinking and reactance) to explain resistance towards use of the NHS contact-tracing app. Our study builds on concepts of User eXperience (UX) and algorithm aversion and demonstrates the relevance of these elements to the key criminological problem of resistance to official technologies.

How the Law Learns in the Digital Society

Recent court decisions have revealed how the law is frequently under pressure to adjust to novel digital technologies. As legal practice is blind to the factual particularities of the relationship between law and technology, the courts’ efforts to re-stabilize normative expectations of Internet users, in the face of sociotechnical changes caused by computer networks, lack an adequate theoretical classification. Science and technology studies (STS) provide refined knowledge on the interaction between technology and society. Yet, the law and normative structures have remained a stepchild of that branch of interdisciplinary theorizing within the social sciences. Within the legal discipline, media-based theories about the law in the digital environment have conceived computer networks as hybrid sociotechnical constructs. This approach aptly shows how digital media have changed the way individuals experience the world and interact with one another and how the capacity to adjust cognitive behavioral expectations to new developments has become crucial. While the learning of individuals takes center stage, this perspective belittles the relevance of normative expectations and overlooks the law’s learning. How is the law capable of learning under conditions of computer networks and responding to the sociopolitical changes caused by the new technologies? This paper’s aim is to propose a perspective on the law in the digital society that combines STS with legal sociology. An approach based on technical affordances explains how normative behavioral expectations can adjust to changes in the networked environment and how the law learns in the digital society.

Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk (2021) Technology. GlassHouse Book: Routledge

Kieran Tranter reviews Technology by Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk

And then 'Friends'

This brief editorial focuses on the contribution in this volume titled ‘Machines Will Never Replace Humans!’ compiled by GPT-3. The brief text is provocative. It is provocative in demonstrating the potential efficiencies and complexities of machine-produced natural language text for ‘writing’ professions like law and the academy. It is further provocative as it reflects back the image and representation of the human within the digital. There is a denotive suggestion that humans are valuable and significant as lawyers because they possess intuition. There is a further suggestion that humans, or more precisely the imprint of humans in the digital, are televisual consumers of dated sitcoms, revealing the disconnect between existent digital archives and the totality of humanity.

From Shadow Profiles to Contact Tracing: Qualitative Research into Consent and Privacy

For many privacy scholars, consent is on life support, if not dead. In July 2020, we held six focus groups in Australia to test this claim by gauging attitudes to consent and privacy, with a spotlight on smartphones. These focus groups included discussion of four case studies: ‘shadow profiles’, eavesdropping by companies on smartphone users, non-consensual government surveillance of its citizens and contact tracing apps developed to combat COVID-19. Our participants expressed concerns about these practices and said they valued individual consent and saw it as a key element of privacy protection. However, they saw the limits of individual consent, saying that the law and the design of digital services also have key roles to play. Building on these findings, we argue for a blend of good law, good design and an appreciation that individual consent is still valued and must be fixed rather than discarded - ideally in ways that are also collective. In other words, consent is dead; long live consent.

Michael Guihot and Lyria Bennett Moses (2020). Artificial Intelligence, Robots and the Law, LexisNexis Australia

Nicholas Korpela reviews Michael Guihot and Lyria Bennett Moses (2020). Artificial Intelligence, Robots and the Law

‘Sharing is Caring’: Copyright Metaphors and Online Sharing Norms

Copyright is under contest in Australia amid growing digital cultures of sharing. Using metaphor as a frame for analysis, this study applies internet search data (Google Trends) methods to visualise Australian online information-seeking patterns for metaphors related to copyright and sharing. An overview of legal metaphors of online copyright (‘piracy’, ‘war on copyright’) and metaphors of digital sharing (‘sharing is caring’, ‘sharing economy’) leads to a critical examination of the ‘metaphor struggles’ between the rhetoric of copyright infringement and sharing cultures promoted by social media. Key findings presented are of decreased information seeking for copyright metaphors and increased information seeking for sharing metaphors. Online information-seeking patterns, as visualised by internet search data, represent a form of public mobilisation. Visualisation of these patterns of public information seeking for metaphors of copyright and sharing demonstrates shifting conceptions of copyright in contemporary digital cultures. This article concludes by raising a potential relationship between rising ethics of online sharing norms and diminishing legitimacy of online copyright, as the legal metaphor of copyright appears to transition through the metaphor cycle.

Will Machines Replace Us? Machine-Authored Texts and the Future of Scholarship

We present here the first machine-generated law review article. Our self-interest motivates us to believe that knowledge workers who write complex articles drawing upon years of research and effort are safe from AI developments. However, how reasonable is it to persist in this belief given recent advances in AI research? With that topic in mind, we caused GPT-3, a state-of-the-art AI, to generate a paper that explains “why humans will always be better lawyers, drivers, CEOs, presidents, and law professors than artificial intelligence and robots can ever hope to be.” The resulting paper, with no edits apart from giving it a title and bolding the headings generated by GPT-3, is reproduced below. It is imperfect in a humorous way. Ironically, it is publishable “as-is” only because it is machine-generated. Nevertheless, the resulting paper is good enough to give us some pause for thought. Although GPT-3 is not up to the task of replacing law review authors currently, we are far less confident that GPT-5 or GPT-100 might not be up to the task in future.

Improving the Credibility of Empirical Legal Research: Practical Suggestions for Researchers, Journals and Law Schools

Fields closely related to empirical legal research (ELR) are enhancing their methods to improve the credibility of their findings. This includes making data, analysis codes and other materials openly available on digital repositories and preregistering studies. There are numerous benefits to these practices, such as research being easier to find and access through digital research methods. However, ELR appears to be lagging cognate fields. This may be partly due to a lack of field-specific meta-research and guidance. We sought to fill that gap by first evaluating credibility indicators in ELR, including a review of guidelines for legal journals. This review finds considerable room for improvement in how law journals regulate ELR. The remainder of the article provides practical guidance for the field. We start with general recommendations for empirical legal researchers and then turn to recommendations aimed at three commonly used empirical legal methods: content analyses of judicial decisions, surveys and qualitative studies. We end with suggestions for journals and law schools.

Automation of the Spectrum, Automation and the Spectrum: Legal Challenges When Optimising Spectrum Use for Military Operations

The role of the electromagnetic spectrum in all manner of military operations is increasing. The same can be said for all aspects of our everyday civilian lives. Consequently, demand on the spectrum, both by the military and for civilian purposes, is increasing. The spectrum, while fully renewable, is not unlimited at any one point in time and allocation of the spectrum for optimum utilisation is key. This is raising a range of issues. Questions arise both because of the role of autonomous capabilities in devices that make use of the spectrum, which have the potential to create demand and interference challenges, and because of the valuable role that autonomous capabilities may play in managing the spectrum itself. This paper looks at attempts to use automation technologies to better utilise and manage the spectrum while noting the challenges created by signal interference and the ‘dual-use’ nature of this valuable resource.