Data leaks can pose a threat to national security

The threats technology poses to intimate privacy extend beyond individual expression, Citron warned, it also poses a threat to national security. Deepfakes, increasingly realistic, faked audio or video recordings, could alter the outcomes of an election. Imagine if a convincing video of President Biden admitting to “stealing” U.S. elections, or a speech altered to look and sound like a declaration of war, proliferated across social media. As deepfakes become more realistic too, democracy and our democratic discourse suffer. Citron pointed out that women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and other vulnerable groups are often the “canaries in the coalmine” for digital threats that could extend to the larger population. Currently, around 95 percent of deepfakes circulating on the internet are women’s faces placed onto pornography. The practice is not only deeply traumatizing for victims, but also pulls women offline, as evidenced by the case of Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, whose face was placed on a pornographic video, faced internet harassment, and doxxing to silence her reporting on the Modhi government. In a post-Dobbs environment, the risks of intimate privacy data violations become even more dangerous, according to Citron. Data associated with period tracking apps, health information, and location services could be sold by data brokers to law enforcement to prosecute pregnant people who seek or obtain an abortion. As UC Davis Law Professor Elizabeth Joh warns, “Dobbs reminds us of how little control we have over our digital selves and emphasizes how digital rights are also reproductive rights.” Digital surveillance over women’s reproductive lives will likely disproportionately impact women of color and women with fewer resources. During the conversation with Citron, several participants asked what, legally and personally, can be done to protect us from the perils of deepfakes and other intimate privacy violations. Citron proposes reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides broad immunity to tech platforms for content posted by third parties, even discriminatory content, unless the platform materially contributed to the content. In testimony before Congress, Citron contended that not all platforms on the internet should be considered good faith actors. Some “bad Samaritans,” as she calls them, such as revenge porn websites, should be denied the blanket immunity for content that Section 230 offers. Such reforms complement proposals that Professor Mary Anne Franks discussed at CFR this past summer, in which she shared steps the White House Gender Policy Council is taking with the launch of a task force to address online harassment and abuse. Ultimately, regulating the ability of private companies to collect certain types of data, like intimate privacy data, will make us less vulnerable to its weaponization. If intimate privacy were legally a civil right, argues Citron, companies would be obligated to protect the information, rather than profit from it.