Surveillance rulings and social media scrutiny.
Ben Yelin: Hello, and welcome to "Caveat," N2K CyberWire's privacy, surveillance, law, and policy podcast. I'm Ben Yelin from the University of Maryland Center for Cyber Health and Hazard Strategies. Joining me today is N2K CyberWire's Lead Analyst for Cybersecurity and Policy, Ethan Cook. Hey, Ethan.
Ethan Cook: Hi, Ben.
Ben Yelin: On today's show, I delve into a new paper discussing the broader implications of the Supreme Court's recent Chatrie decision. Ethan has the story of a U.S. appeals court allowing a lawsuit against the big social media companies to proceed. While this show covers legal topics, and I am a lawyer, the views expressed do not constitute legal advice. For official legal advice on any of the topics we cover, please contact your attorney. [ Music ] Ethan, we're back.
Ethan Cook: I'm back. We're back.
Ben Yelin: They are still letting the kids be in charge, somehow.
Ethan Cook: Yeah, we've -- Dave's gone. He's yesterday's news. He'll be back next week.
Ben Yelin: He is yesterday's news. He's old hat. Yeah, no, he'll be back. He's out in a secure, undisclosed location. It's like the Odyssey. Every week, Dave washes up on a new island and confronts --
Ethan Cook: And he's running away from it, always back to us.
Ben Yelin: All right. That sounds like a great video somebody should make within the N2K CyberWire universe. On to our stories, though, on better topics. I've talked a lot about Professor Orin Kerr over the years. You know, he's probably a little creeped out by it at this point, [laughter] but this is a very good paper, and I really think it's worth discussing. I was kind of waiting for his take on the Supreme Court's Chatrie decision. If you'll recall, that decision, which came out earlier this summer, said that the Supreme Court does need a warrant to access location data as part of a geofence warrant. The reasoning is that we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our cell phones' location services. The Supreme Court, I think, was relatively muted in how it described its own decision, and that's what's interesting here. They didn't say, "We're breaking new ground on the Fourth Amendment." They basically said -- and this is in the opinion, the majority opinion, drafted by Justice Kagan -- this is just an extension of previous Fourth Amendment case law going back to Carpenter, which was about cell-site location information. What Kerr is saying is that this isn't actually a narrow case. That this is not only as important as Carpenter, but potentially, more important than Carpenter. This ruling, if you read it closely, reshapes our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence by introducing new principles that we have never yet considered. He kind of goes over the reasons why this is such a blockbuster. For one, it throws our previous Fourth Amendment precedents either in, sort of, a different direction than we had previously understood them or has kind of put them on the chopping block, and we'll get to some examples of that. Then there's uncertainty for lower courts. How are we going to apply this statutory decision to a bunch of novel circumstances, which you and I should definitely talk about, particularly on a subject near and dear to our hearts, which is automated license plate readers.
Ethan Cook: Oh, bringing it back.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, bringing it back. Bringing it back to last week, so I will get there. He basically says there are three possible readings of what the Chatrie decision is. These are, kind of, three competing theories, and I look at them as, sort of, concentric circles. The narrowest circle is Chatrie as a location privacy case. Basically, in that interpretation, Chatrie is about location information. There would be special constitutional protection for records that reveal the whole of a person's movement as they travel through physical space. This is somewhat of an extension of Carpenter, although the Court in Carpenter didn't focus necessarily purely on the fact of Mr. Carpenter sharing his location through historical cell-site location information. There were other factors. They talked about the depth and breadth of the data collection and the involuntary nature of the collection itself, but I think one reading of Chatrie is that we do have extra established constitutional protection in location information, which would go against some Supreme Court precedent cases such as United States v. Knotts, where they attached a beeper on a car that was driving on public thoroughfares, and the Supreme Court said you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy vis-a-vis where you're driving because it's public. That interpretation would introduce a lot of novel questions. You know, what actually counts as a location record? How precise must the location be before it becomes a constitutional issue, that sort of thing? To go out a little bit broader, the second concentric circle would be Chatrie as a case about cell phone privacy. I think this is the interpretation that's most grounded in the text. What Kagan seems to be saying in her majority opinion is that cell phones are special. We all have them. We all have to use them to participate in the joys of modern living.
Ethan Cook: I was going to say, you can't live in today's world without a cell phone. You can, but it is incredibly difficult.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, I mean, you try doing it, right? Try to go a day without using your cell phone and see how that works out for you.
Ethan Cook: Any business, anything, like, oh, what's your email? You need to have your email on you 24/7. It's just kind of the nature of these things, text messaging, everything.
Ben Yelin: Right. You know, I'm driving around yesterday. The sky is starting to look a little bit cloudy. Bam, on my cellphone, I got a tornado warning alert. I can take action, right? It's literally everything, and what this interpretation would hold is that because these smartphones reveal a ton of personal information, the Court might be saying that cell phone-related records, basically records generated by the normal use of one's cell phone, deserve special constitutional protection. This would apply to things like location services, not necessarily because they're location services, but because it's records generated based on the fact that you are using a modern smartphone. That would be the key emphasis there. Then you have the largest concentric circle, which would be a reinterpretation of the so-called "third-party doctrine." Basically Chatrie, without explicitly doing so, would establish a new constitutional framework around third-party records. Constitutional protection wouldn't necessarily depend on who possesses the data, which is kind of the previous constitutional regime. If the company possesses the data, you lose your reasonable expectation of privacy, but rather, on the nature of the information itself. Location data is yours. It's private information. It can reveal intimate details of your life, and maybe we could reconsider that doctrine entirely. He doesn't choose between these interpretations. This is just sort of to introduce to the audience where Chatrie could lead us. It gets really interesting when you start to apply it to novel scenarios. That's where I kind of wanted to discuss automated license plate readers.
Ethan Cook: Yeah.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, and I promise I'll shut up and give you a --
Ethan Cook: You know I love your legalese. It's my favorite conversations with you.
Ben Yelin: I swear I'm almost done, but just looking at these three interpretations through the lens of automated license plate readers, if this is purely a doctrine now on location privacy, then I think those are constitutionally protected records. If we're giving extra constitutional protection to the whole of a person's movement, something like Flock cameras, that can capture the whole of a person's movement very easily.
Ethan Cook: I was going to say, I think that if you're going under that interpretation, it's unquestionably so, personal information.
Ben Yelin: Totally. Whereas if it's the sort of cell phone privacy-concentric circle, then it wouldn't apply, because automated license plate readers are not on our cell phones. If it's the cell phone that merits, kind of, extra constitutional protection, that wouldn't apply to automated license plate readers. Then it gets even more complicated with corporate-held records or third-party held records. Who holds that information? Well, a Flock camera does, or any other company that collects automated license plate reader data. It often belongs to police departments, so is this information private? Do you have a right to that information, even though Flock is the one that's been taking your pictures, and they've been sending it to their clients who are local police departments? We don't know. All of this is to say the space for new interpretations of the Fourth Amendment is just completely wide open. I think this article is getting at that. Like, if you read Chatrie closely, we are potentially upending decades' worth of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and we're going to start to see that play out as cases come down the pike. I think, kind of, one by one, as we start to see these cases, we should figure out how are courts interpreting Chatrie, as, kind of, a narrow case about location records, or a case about data held by third parties? I will stop there. Ethan, take it away.
Ethan Cook: I think you hit the nail on the head, which we said this when Chatrie was made, right, when this was ruled, that this was going to create a lot of headaches for people and that there was a lot of things that still needed to be resolved. That kind of happens whenever you upend precedent and rule unexpectedly, right? I think it's fair to say that the Chatrie ruling, while I personally like it, was not what was expected and was kind of like a head-turner. I'm not surprised that all these questions are being raised. I think when you can look at Flock, you can look at another example, like, other privacy cases, and I think you're going to find yourself coming back to the same, kind of, conversation over and over again, which is, "Well, it depends on how you want to interpret Chatrie." I assume that what's going to happen, logistically speaking, is that over the next -- I don't know -- three to five years, we're going to have several court cases which are going to have varying precedents based on their own interpretations, and we're going to find ourselves back in the Supreme Court, and they're going to make another ruling that will maybe clear it up. "Maybe" is a strong word.
Ben Yelin: It's really -- I mean, that is such a great point, and that's absolutely where I see this going. Because they left -- the Court in Chatrie left all of these questions unanswered, lower courts are just going to be guessing. When you have a lot of smart judges who are, kind of, guessing at exactly what Chatrie means, they're going to make different guesses from one another. You know, we know that there is no singular, correct interpretation of Chatrie because the Supreme Court itself didn't give us that singular interpretation if you read between the lines of their decision. The upshot of this is things are going to be really confusing for a few years. Every criminal defendant is going to try to put the surveillance that led to their apprehension through the Chatrie ringer, saying, "You know, the surveillance you used is equivalent to the location information collection in Chatrie, and here's why." Every prosecutor is going to say, "No, it's not," [laughter] and, you know, they'll come at it from a different perspective. Ultimately, these nine individuals, or maybe a different, slightly different set of nine individuals, three or five years down the line, is going to have to clarify this for us.
Ethan Cook: Yeah.
Ben Yelin: It would be nice if they could just clarify it explicitly, like, if we could just ask them a couple of brief follow-up questions, but that's not how it works.
Ethan Cook: No, and I think they did that purposely. I think they did the kick-the-can-down-the-road and hopefully I'm not on the Court when this re-pops back up, or there's been enough cases where I've had enough time to really make a decision on this.
Ben Yelin: Totally.
Ethan Cook: I think there is, you know, going into the various outcomes that have been -- you know, the three pathways of interpretation, I think the most -- the two most interesting ones to me are the phone argument, as well as the general reinterpretation of what personal data means and what the expectation is because those feel like, to me, the most truly -- via the third-party doctrine -- the truly upending, kind of, conversations here. Regarding phone, right, I think, as we said, it's a device that is unavoidable in modern society. Like, I'm sure there's someone in the world, in the U.S., who does not have a smartphone, absolutely, but the vast majority do. Phone companies want you to have a smartphone. There's a reason they do -- because they collect crazy amounts of data off of it. That's why you can get, like, crazy-good deals to buy cheap smartphones that are a couple years old, because they want you to have a smartphone. They collect massive amounts of data off it, and they make money off -- they make their money back. I think reinterpreting the smartphone, I think, opens a door to, well, then why not include, like, you know, smartwatches, any smart device, right, things that we can't escape? These are going to inevitably become more and more -- I think it opens -- you know, we're opening the door there to just start including other devices, because, yeah, I agree, the smartphone is probably the most egregious of the devices, but as everything gets more interconnected, like, if my smartphone connects to my car, does that include my car, right? You know, does that extend over because my car can get my text messages? It can get my emails. It can get my phone calls. It can get my location. That, to me, seems like something that very quickly connects to, well, it's just as interconnected, and by that logic, if a phone is a device that is inevitable or is treated extra, then why isn't my car, which does 90% of the same things, if it's connected to my phone?
Ben Yelin: That's a great point. It's not even just a car. Like, I take my MacBook Air most places that I go, and that also is extremely revealing. If you were to get a look inside my MacBook Air, you'd get much of the same information. You'd get -- including things like historical location information, that you would get from my smartphone. If the interpretation of the case is that smartphones are special, that has a lot of very confusing downstream implications. Like, there are a lot of things that are like smartphones but aren't smartphones, and so what do we do in those circumstances?
Ethan Cook: Like, if we said that 10 years ago, I'd be like, all right, that's a fair kind of argument because technology was not where it was today, but, I mean, we can't -- I mean, my whole favorite, like, subculture Internet movement is bring back the knobs, where people want appliances and devices that don't have smart screens built into them because everyone's kind of, like, I don't want to have my toaster be Bluetooth-connected to my phone or something like that, right? I think that the more we just keep expanding and the Internet of Things keeps growing and becomes more interconnected, if we're going to go the privacy route of the phone is this special, unique device, I don't think that that really holds up, really, anymore. As we become more interconnected, I think that's just going to hold up even less. I think if you flip that and go to the other end, which is the third-party doctrine, which I think out of all the outcomes is probably my favorite one. I, for a long time, have personally believed that third parties get a huge breadth of just, like, whoopsie moments when they expose personal data, mishandle personal data, et cetera. The punishment is like, "Oh, we're sorry. Here's some two years of identity monitoring. We're sorry that you may have your Social Security leaked in 10 years. Our bad." The punishments are so -- or the crackbacks are just so minor that I felt for a long time that this needs to be something that's addressed. I mean, you look at social media companies and how they collect data and how they harvest it. There are numerous cases, I don't want to name any companies, of ones where they put their software -- they don't even know who they're giving the third-party software to, right? This isn't just, like, oh, someone's name, which is already sensitive, but it's how often they post, what they post, where they post, what their birthday is, you know, all this sensitive information that if you told someone, hey, I don't want -- "Hey, would you like to give that up to a random person who's making money off you?" Most people would say, absolutely not. I think redefining the third-party doctrine, while, to your point, is going to create, probably out of the three the most amount of headaches out of all of them, I do think is probably the -- while the hardest road to travel is probably the best road to travel for long-term, like, privacy security within the U.S. I don't think that will be the interpretation because I think that will be too many headaches that no one wants to deal with, but it would be the personal -- like, I would love to see that.
Ben Yelin: You know, it's funny because all of these interpretations are outgrowths of the Katz test, which is about reasonable expectation of privacy. Justice Gorsuch would say, how about we just throw out this entire formulation and make this whether something is a search or not dependent on traditional property law, right? It used to be if there was a physical trespass on your property, that would count as a Fourth Amendment search. The literal words in the Constitution are "persons," "papers," "effects," and "houses," right? I think when you talk about something like "papers and effects," most courts have interpreted those as existing in the nonphysical realm, in the electronic world. If it's our papers, if it's our data and our effects, and we are giving them temporarily for a limited purpose to a third party, in Justice Gorsuch's formulation, it is still our data, and we still have a constitutional right in it. So just putting it out there that, like, all of this is trying to pigeonhole modern technology into this reasonable expectation of privacy framework, and we don't have to do that. There are alternatives.
Ethan Cook: Yeah, and I think that alternative is probably -- I think going down that pathway is something that would benefit more than not, right? As someone who's a privacy guy, I think we often like to bend over backwards with terminology and loopholes and be like, well, it's not technically blah, blah, blah, whatever, right? Part of me always wants to just come back to this, like, let's just come up for air and, like, all have a sensible conclusion here, which is we all do not like how much data is collected on us. We don't all like that you can go into any data broker website and, like, Google your name and it will find you, your parents, your siblings, if you have them, kids, their birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, et cetera. You're like, that's kind of creepy, right? Yeah, you can request a deletion, but how many people are actually doing that? That's not something that's, like, standard, and most people don't even know that you can do that. We've been, well, technically they're not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and going through the route of, like, yeah, it's personal property right. You know, it's protected, which is, I think, clears up so many things and, like, returns it to a normal conversation again and not have to, like, layer 40 things on top of it.
Ben Yelin: I mean, we are path dependent because we live in a common-law system on this Supreme Court decision that I, and many other scholars, think is just kind of -- I wouldn't even say fundamentally flawed. It's fundamentally a weird way of looking at Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. I would love to formulate an alternative and --
Ethan Cook: Maybe eventually throw it against the wall and see what sticks, right?
Ben Yelin: Yeah, and now they've just kind of been stuck with it for 50 years, and it would be great if, you know, that could merit some reconsideration. Now, right now, only one justice has that frame of mind, but maybe as --
Ethan Cook: Who knows?
Ben Yelin: Who knows? Yeah, as time continues to march forward --
Ethan Cook: In 25 years, we may have two.
Ben Yelin: We may have two, exactly. Sometimes it takes a lifetime for these things to change. Well, we are going to take a short break to get a word from our sponsors, and then, we will hear from Ethan on his story. [ Music ] Ethan, what do you got for us?
Ethan Cook: Yeah, so we're going to stay in the legal world today for everyone, but this one's a little bit different. Instead of talking about privacy expectations, we're going to talk about the Court's ruling against social media companies, which I think we can all get behind.
Ben Yelin: Unless you happen to work for one of these big guys, yeah, I think we kind of like them getting their comeuppance, no offense.
Ethan Cook: I mean, it's only, you know, two decades coming, right?
Ben Yelin: Yeah.
Ethan Cook: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals within San Francisco rejected an appeal by both Meta and TikTok earlier this week to overturn a lower court ruling, which would require them to face over 3,000 lawsuits in federal court. These lawsuits are explicitly talking about the way that these social media companies have designed their platforms to create addictive features that trap young users in. This is nothing new. This is something that has, obviously, been a building conversational point for years, as well as has been in the past six months. Major lawsuits have been handed against these companies regarding their design practices. Now, for context, many of these companies have evaded any sort of accountability through Section 230.
Ben Yelin: The magic of Section 230.
Ethan Cook: Right? You just, you know, wave your magic wand, and suddenly, you did no wrong. Before we dive into that, I figured it would be a good opportunity for you, Ben, here to kind of just cover what Section 230 is and how these companies have enabled -- used it to kind of evade any accountability.
Ben Yelin: Sure. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a provision that says that these big platforms, this company -- these companies -- are protected from liability for user-generated content. The Communications Decency Act, the full statute itself, was a way to try to reduce the smut that was on the burgeoning Internet in the 1990s, but in order for some of the big platforms at the time to agree to a law that was going to crack down on some of the terrible things that were on the early Internet, like unregulated pornography, they needed to put this provision in there that shielded these companies from liability for user-generated content, and it makes sense, right?
Ethan Cook: Right. It's not -- and the companies will say this -- like, it's not -- they are providing rules as to what content can be posted on their site, and they should be able to do that without having this sword of potential liability hanging over them. They've embraced this 230 shield for a generation now. I know there have been several proposals in Congress to do away with Section 230 and to hold these big tech companies accountable. What's interesting about this lawsuit, as I know you'll explain, is this would be a way to hold the companies accountable without really messing at all with Section 230.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, I think -- so I'm actually a pro-Section 230 fan. I'm not a pro with how it's been used, but I think the concept of, especially when you look at how much data is uploaded to the Internet daily, you can't catch it all. Holding anyone accountable to catching everything put on their platform, especially when it's a social media site, is just unreasonable. You're never going to be able to do it, so creating legal punishments for that, it's just like, what are they supposed to do? YouTube is supposed to go through every single video that is uploaded to it and take it down within a set number of, you know, hours?
Ethan Cook: Right. I mean, it would ruin the modern Internet because companies would just be like, yeah, we're basically not going to host anything. We're so concerned about liability that unless you have the most anodyne, mild content possible, which would be completely uninteresting to most people, we're not going to allow you to post it.
Ben Yelin: Exactly. I think I've always kind of looked at it like I'm for Section 230. I think it's a reasonable request from a platform on the Internet that they can have some sort of protection. I think it's when you take it to how they've interpreted it, which is, "Oh, you can't come at us with any complaints because we have immunity. It's not our fault that your child's addicted to the content posted on here. It's because you as a parent couldn't control them." You know, almost like this victim-blaming mentality. I think when you -- these new court cases that have really kind of gained popularity over the past year, it's not about the content. It's about the way they've designed their platforms to purposely keep people on as long as humanly possible. Features such as infinite scroll, where, you know, you can just keep going forever. You could keep tapping -- going through your Reels, and they will never stop. Things like the recommendation algorithms, which are so finely tuned. I mean, there was an article I read a couple weeks ago that someone -- there was a group of researchers who went onto TikTok with new accounts, fresh new accounts, new emails, new everything, and they were able to pretend like they were left or right, and TikTok picked it up in under five minutes and was able to provide them content in that echo chamber rapidly. It's scary, right, how fast it can go and how finely tuned it can get information for you.
Ethan Cook: It puts people in a -- I never know how to pronounce this word -- an epistemological bubble.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, yeah, I've never heard that word before, so I'm right there with you.
Ethan Cook: They are only exposed to opinions that they already agree with, and it kind of warps their sense of perspective to the point where, you know -- not to get too political here -- everybody kind of thinks they're part of some silent majority that would win every election if there were not, whatever, voter fraud, voter suppression, because online they're surrounded only by like-minded people. They're never seeing opinions from people who think differently.
Ben Yelin: It's confirmation bias, right? Like, oh, if I'm surrounded by, in my personal life, people who agree with me, because you tend to surround with people who agree with you, and then on the Internet, I only see content that people agree with me and I only watch news sources from places that agree with me. Then everyone agrees with me. Why would anyone disagree with me, right? For years, you know, the conversation has never been really about -- or hasn't successfully been about -- what the platforms are designing. It's about, you know, how do we -- you know, how do we build better content moderation, et cetera? I think we're now at this tipping point where trials and lawsuits are about, you have purposely designed platforms, and knowingly, that they would harm mental health, that they would hurt people on your platform, either addict them to the platform or, you know, expose them to maybe, you know, concerning health behaviors in a minor, such as, like, eating disorders or self-harm, and you didn't care because you made your millions. I think this Court opens up -- this ruling opens up, kind of, the floodgates, saying, no, these are all -- you can be held accountable. We've already seen major lawsuits, even before this ruling already come home. New Mexico, like, days before, had a massive lawsuit wrap up where they fined Meta for $567 million, and it directly in the judge's statement said they contributed to the youth mental health crisis and that the funds are going to go straight to a teen mental health fund to help with minors who have been either addicted or are being addicted to these platforms. I think it's also a reaction to -- there have been several cases over the past several months. There's a very famous one from California where a woman sued individually about the harms that social media created. I think she was about 20. She's like, yeah, over the past decade, during my formative minor years, these platforms all contributed to my mental health declining severely. She was awarded, you know, I think, several hundred million dollars from various companies.
Ethan Cook: Yeah, I mean, when it comes to state lawsuits, and you mentioned that 29 states have filed some sort of lawsuit related to the harm of online algorithms, a lot of states are really strapped for revenue, and if there's the prospect of winning or just coming to a settlement with one of these companies, every little bit helps. It's not going to be, like, a major revenue source for a state, but if you can pay for --
Ben Yelin: Nearly a billion dollars is pretty, pretty good.
Ethan Cook: It's pretty good. If you can pay for one mental health program in the state because of a successful lawsuit or a settlement, you know, that's certainly going to provide incentive to do it, and now we have the vehicle, right? This is not a case about someone's content that's posted on the platform. That is still protected by Section 230. This is about decisions that these companies are making themselves as to which information to put in front of you to make you addicted, and as Dave has always said, I mean, this is the 21st-century version of the cases against the tobacco companies in the 1990s, right? Yes, we chose to smoke. People used to smoke a lot more than they do now. It was very unpleasant, and it's ultimately --
Ben Yelin: It's your personal choice, but when it becomes, well, you design such a product that removes a degree of personal choice because we're so scientifically advanced, we can figure out how humans think, is it really a choice anymore?
Ethan Cook: Exactly, and I think that -- when we get to the oral argument in this case, I think that's going to be a key argument of the plaintiffs here. That it's a -- yes, you know, we are contributing to our own algorithm by clicking in the first place on certain Reels or liking them, but it's part of a much broader system scientifically engineered to warp our brains. I think in the long run, we might see real damages from that, damages that courts are willing to recognize in terms of mental health harms, that sort of thing.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, and I think, you know, as this continues to gain headway, I'm really -- I think a conversational point that has been sort of talked about, but not really, I think it's important, is what are the impacts that this is going to have on social media companies? Like, how is this going to impact platforms? Because right now the general rulings are either, A, yes, you contributed negatively to this person's mental health. You have to pay that individual or class-action group a lot of money in damages, but I think a lot of the new ones coming through from states aren't just about, oh, an individual plaintiff suing. They are more about you as a company harmed our citizens, so not only are you going to pay damages, but I think there's a world where we start seeing punishments or legislation come through as more legal precedent is created, saying you need to remove these addictive features. You cannot have an infinite scroll. You cannot have these recommendation algorithms the way they're designed. While they have already some -- obviously, there have been some laws proposed about these things. They haven't ever been passed. I think that's a really important conversational point that needs to be talked about more, which is how is that going to impact social media companies? How is that going to impact the platforms we engage with, right? I mean, TikTok was such a massive deal when that got sold within the U.S., pretty much entirely because of the algorithm, because the algorithm is so effective. Does that destroy these companies' values almost instantaneously? Because you can collect all the data you want, but it doesn't matter if you can't have an algorithm that processes it and turns it into value.
Ethan Cook: Right. As you say, the data in and of itself is generally not that valuable.
Ben Yelin: Exactly.
Ethan Cook: If you were to show somebody a typical Reel that exists now, if you were to show that to somebody from 30 years ago, they'd be, like, what is this? What am I watching? Why is this funny? It's the propagation of these things that is algorithmically driven that makes us more interested in them as a thing, so the algorithm itself is really the value, which is why this is just a fascinating story, and certainly, a lawsuit that we will be tracking closely here on this podcast.
Ben Yelin: Yeah, I think the long-term implications of this will have dramatic impacts on what -- over the next 5 to 10 years -- what is illegal and what is legally allowed to be designed in the social media platforms and what are the avenues for parents or people -- minors who were impacted by these? What are the legal avenues to get damages back? I mean, I'm from that generation where social media was just emerging and really starting, you know, to take off when I was in high school and middle school. Whether it's peers of mine or, you know, the feelings that I've seen online myself from anecdotally speaking, being like, yeah, I could definitely see a world where this gets out of hand really fast in terms of the lawsuits. At what point does a company say, yeah, we're losing $2 billion a year from lawsuits in this. This is just not sustainable right now, let alone in five years when it continues to, you know, grow and grow and grow. I think it's something to keep an eye on, and I think it could have a massive implication for U.S. tech companies.
Ethan Cook: Well, I think one of the disappointing aspects of this episode for all of our listeners is that it depends on what happens in the next three to five years.
Ben Yelin: [Laughter] As with everything. I can't be wrong if I just keep saying that.
Ethan Cook: I think it's a, you know, way to propagate our podcast. You can't cancel us if all these matters are going to be decided in the future, right?
Ben Yelin: Exactly. You just come back in three years. You know, keep listening for three years. We'll have updates.
Ethan Cook: We'll still be here.
Ben Yelin: Well, thank you, everybody, and thank you, Ethan. That is "Caveat" brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We would love to hear what you think about this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to caveat@n2k.com. This episode is produced by Liz Stokes. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Eiben. The show is mixed by Tré Hester. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. I'm Ben Yelin.
Ethan Cook: And I'm Ethan Cook.
Ben Yelin: Thanks for listening.
