Chilling Effects, Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age - Jonathon W. Penney

  • CPDP Book Club
  • CPDP Book Club
  • Cinema
  • Wednesday 20.05 — 11:50 - 13:05

In Chilling Effects, Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects – or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights – have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.

Jonathon W. Penney

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Jonathon Penney is Associate Professor and York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a Senior Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. His award-winning research on privacy, technology, and human rights has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters International, The Guardian, and Le Monde, among others, and has been profiled in WIRED and Harvard Magazine

Ido Sivan-Sevilla (Remote Speaker)

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Israel

Dr. Ido Sivan-Sevilla holds a joint academic position as an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University’s School of Public Policy & Governance and The School of Computer Science and Engineering. His research brings together the fields of computer science and public policy by comparatively studying governance and regulatory structures across a range of cybersecurity, privacy, information integrity, and machine learning problems in a range of jurisdictions. Dr. Sivan-Sevilla develops computational methods to advance evidence-based tech policy and studies policy design, regulatory enforcement, and policy compliance across large-scale popular technologies, with the aim of developing adaptive and learning models for tech regulation.

Aurelia Tamo-Larrieux

University of Lausanne - Switzerland

Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux is an Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Faculty of Law, heading the team of Digital and Computational Law and leading the Legal Design & Code Lab. She is also a lecturer at EPFL, teaching Law and Computation to engineers and computer scientists.

Aleksandra Kuczerawy

KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law - Belgium

Aleksandra Kuczerawy obtained her law degree at the University of Wroclaw (Poland) in 2006. During her studies she started cooperation with the CBKE (The Research Center for Legal and Economic Issues of Electronic Communication). From September 2005 until February 2006, she studied as an exchange student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. After graduation, she attended the Postgraduate Study Programme in Legal Informatics (Rechtsinformatik) of the University of Hanover (EULISP) where she obtained her LL.M degree. During the summer term 2007 she came to the KU Leuven as an exchange student.