IIT Chicago-Kent presents "Under Watchful Eyes: The Technologies That Track"

"Location, location, location…" It's not just the first rule of real estate. Businesses and governments can use smartphones and other location tracking technologies to follow individuals' activities and whereabouts—at home, at work and beyond. As one data analyst remarked, "We can determine where you work, how you spend your time, and with whom, and with 87 percent certainty where you'll be next Thursday at 5:35 p.m."

IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law will present "Under Watchful Eyes: The Technologies That Track," a one-day conference that will bring together a wide range of experts in the technology, legal, computer science, and information privacy fields who will focus on privacy issues created by the ever-increasing use of geo-location data.

The conference will be held October 5 from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the law school's Governor Richard B. Ogilvie Auditorium, 565 West Adams St. (between Clinton and Jefferson streets) in Chicago. (Registration and coffee begin at 8:45 a.m.)  Attendance is free of charge, but reservations are required. The conference is eligible for 5.0 hours of IL MCLE credit. A reception will be held at the end of the event.

The plenary speaker will be Professor Jeffrey Rosen of George Washington University Law School. Professor Rosen is also legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he leads the Brookings Project on Technology and Constitution. He is the co-editor of Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change (Brookings Press 2011) and is the author of The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (Random House, 2000), which The New York Times called "the definitive text in privacy perils in the digital age."

Experts will participate in three panel discussions. The first panel, "The Present and the Future," will examine how tracking technologies are used and will be used in the future. Presenters include Caitlin Cottrill of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology; Professor Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., executive director of the Duke University School of Law Center on Law, Ethics and National Security; and Professor Jennifer M. Urban, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California–Berkeley School of Law.

The second panel, "Reaping the Benefits, Respecting Privacy," will consider how we can design geo-location technologies and business models to ensure sufficient respect for privacy. Panelists Frank Douma of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, journalist and artist David Leonard, Piyushimita Thakuriah of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and IIT Chicago-Kent professor Richard Warner will also define what counts as "sufficient respect for privacy."

In the third panel, "What Is the Right Legal Regime?," attorney Theodore F. Claypoole of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, LLP; Professor Nancy Kim of the California Western School of Law; IIT Chicago-Kent Professor Henry H. Perritt, Jr.; and attorney David A. Stampley of KamberLaw, LLC, will examine how the law should best respond to the need to protect privacy while realizing the benefits of tracking technologies.

This program is sponsored by the Center for Information, Society and Policy, a collaboration among public policy experts at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and technology experts at its parent institution, Illinois Institute of Technology. The center promotes interdisciplinary research into privacy and information security issues raised by developing information technologies. To register or for more information, please visit www.kentlaw.iit.edu/cisp.