The Tech Policy Press Podcast

This week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to request information from companies and to issue orders to block content. While there is still work to do to determine how the law will be administered, it joins a range of new tech policy laws and regulations enacted against a backdrop of the increasing centralization of power in India’s government.To discuss the bill, Justin Hendrix is joined by Aditi Agrawal, an independent technology journalist based in New Delhi; Kamesh Shekar, a tech policy expert who leads the privacy and data governance vertical at The Dialogue, a think tank based in Delhi; and Prateek Waghre, the Policy Director at the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization based in India.

Lots of voices are calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the US, at present it seems there is no federal legislation close to becoming law. But in 2023 legislative sessions in states across the country, there has been a surge in AI laws proposed and passed, and some have already taken effect. To learn more about this wave of legislation, I spoke to two people who just posted a comprehensive review of AI laws in US states: Katrina Zhu, a law clerk at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and a law student at the UCLA School of Law, and EPIC senior counsel Ben Winters.

A unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release of four peer-reviewed studies last week in Science and Nature mark the first of as many as sixteen studies that promise fresh insights into the complex dynamics of social media and public discourse. But beyond the findings of the research, the partnership between Meta and some of the most prominent researchers in the field has been held up as a model. With active discussions ongoing in multiple jurisdictions about how best to facilitate access to platform data for independent researchers, it’s worth scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of this partnership. And to do that, Justin Hendrix is joined by one researcher who was able to observe and evaluate nearly every detail of the process for the last three years: the project's rapporteur, Michael Wagner, who in his day job is a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In today’s podcast, Justin Hendrix talks with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect, is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."

Today’s guest on the podcast is Ifeoma Ajunwa, the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Director of AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School, and author of the Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace. from Cambridge University Press. The book considers how data and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace, and whether the law is more equipped to help workers in this transition, or to provide for the interests of employers.

Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companies that employ them. Today’s guest is Justine Bateman, a writer, director, producer, author, and member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the WGA, and SAG-AFTRA. Bateman has been on both sides of the camera for much of her life, and has a particularly sharp perspective on how AI may change the entertainment industry, and why it matters to all workers that the unions are standing up on these issues now.

One of the most urgent debates in tech policy at the moment concerns encrypted communications. At issue in proposed legislation, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EARN It Act put forward in the US Senate, is whether such laws break the privacy promise of end to end encryption by requiring content moderation mechanisms like client-side scanning. But to what extent are such moderation techniques legal under existing laws that limit the monitoring and interception of communications? Today’s guest is James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar with a computer science background who recently conducted a review of various moderation technologies to determine how they might hold up in under US federal communication privacy regimes including the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The conversation touches on how technologies like server side and client side scanning work, the extent to which the law may fail to accommodate or even contemplate such technologies, and where the encryption debate is headed as these technologies advance.

Tomorrow's virtual worlds will be governed, at least at first, by today's legal and regulatory regimes. How will privacy law, torts, IP, or even criminal law apply in 'extended reality' (XR)?Drawing from the discussion at a conference hosted earlier this year at Stanford University called "Existing Law and Extended Reality," this episode asks what challenges will emerge from human behavior and interaction-- with one another and with technology-- inside XR experiences, and what choices governments and tech companies will face in addressing those challenges.This episode of The Sunday Show was produced by Tech Policy Press audio and reporting intern Rebecca Rand, and features the voices of experts such as Brittan Heller (the organizer of the Stanford conference), Mary Anne Franks, Kent Bye, Jameson Spivack, Joseph Palmer, Eugene Volokh, Amie Stepanovich, Susan Aaronson, Florence G'Sell, and Avi Bar Zeev.

This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook, which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Handbook is intended as a resource to help knowledge-producing organizations in the “amplification of fact-based information.” To learn more about the handbook and the ideas on which it is based, Justin Hendrix spoke to GMF research assistant Adrienne Goldstein, as well as Kathryn Peters, executive director of UNC CITAP.

Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, are the hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, a show that seeks to "break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation." Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex and Emily about the show's origins, and what they hope will come of the effort to scrutinize statements about the potential of AI that are often fantastical.