What To Expect This Month

Hi, Prawfs! It's such a privilege to be back here blawging this month. For those who don't know me, my name is Ari Waldman. I'm an associate professor at New York Law School. I research and write about online social interaction, including legal, sociological, and ethical issues related to data privacy, online disclosure, social media, and cyberharassment. I have a couple of ongoing projects that I'm pretty keen on: one is a book project on how we can use trust among individuals to help us define expectations of privacy and the other is a study on how, if at all, norms about privacy trickle down from executives to the engineers, programmers, and designers creating data-hungry products.

Some of my posts this month will be about those two ongoing projects. But most of them will be about the recent decision by the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey in State v. Dharun Ravi, the Tyler Clementi case. Full disclosure: I am a member of the Board of Trustees of the Tyler Clementi Foundation, a family foundation started by Tyler's parents. Its mission is to combat online and offline bullying. I am also the Founder & Director of the Tyler Clementi Institute for CyberSafety, a program at New York Law School that includes, among other things, the first ever law school clinic dedicated exclusively to representing victims of online harassment. Neither these roles will have any effect on my thoughts on the case. I wasn't involved in any aspect of the criminal case.

Thanks for reading this month! Stay tuned ...