NYU School of Law hosts Privacy Localism: A New Research Agenda Nov. 3, 2017.
The election of Donald Trump is widely expected to bring a dramatic retreat from Obama administration support for privacy regulation at the federal level. Republican commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission have already indicated their intention to pursue reversal of many Obama administration policies and last April the President signed legislation repealing the FCC privacy rule. With such changes underway, state and local regulators, particularly those in populous “blue” states, such as New York, California and Washington, are poised to take on an increasingly important role. Recent local initiatives include draft ordinances that require local police departments to publish surveillance impact reports describing the capabilities and safeguards of powerful new surveillance technologies as a condition of deploying them. City officials are also paying more attention to the data privacy implications of smart city initiatives. At the state-level, officials are resisting requests by the Trump administration to access state voter registration databases. Academic experts on administrative law, privacy, federalism, and local governance will be joined by policymakers, industry representatives and privacy advocates to present and discuss a variety of perspectives on the legal, empirical and policy implications of this trend toward “privacy localism.”
