Dilemmas in Digital Abuse

Dilemmas in Digital Abuse

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Digital abuse is on the rise. People are increasingly using networked technologies to engage in harassment, stalking, privacy invasions, and surveillance. The law will often adapt to deal with harmful technologies, but is it adapting quickly enough? Is law even the right tool to confront digital abuse? If it is, which laws work best and who should enforce them?

One of the pressing challenges of our time is deciding whether and how to regulate digital abuse. Through a range of “dilemmas” involving digital abuse, this book will interrogate responses to various harms enabled by networked technologies, exploring issues related to civil rights, consumer protection, cybercrime, free speech, privacy, and private self-governance. In covering these topics, this book confronts issues related to gender, race, class, sexuality, and intersectionality, all of which are crucial to understanding how our society shapes and is shaped by technology.

My goal in publishing these dilemmas is to do my part to make legal education more affordable, accessible, and adaptable. That’s why I’m making the book available to all for free. By using a CC BY-NC license, I’m also inviting others to adapt these materials for their own use, so long as they adhere to the non-commerciality and attribution terms. (Anyone interested in “remixing” this book for their own purposes should feel free to contact me at tek@uga.edu, including if you’d like a more adaptable non-PDF version.)

You’re welcome to print any part of this book if you want a hard copy to accompany the digital version. If you do print it, I ask that you please be environmentally conscious by using double-sided pages. Because the digital version can be easily searched, it contains no index or other finding aids that are conventional for printed books. You should also be able to enhance your experience with the digital version by highlighting text, adding comments, and annotating it in any other ways you find helpful.

You may also purchase a hard copy for around $14 here. This paperback version is made and distributed by Lulu, and I make no revenue from any sales.

Given that this book focuses extensively on different forms of abuse and violence, I caution that some of the dilemmas might induce trauma or distress. I worry that providing individualized content warnings before each dilemma would reflect my own perspectives and experiences but exclude what might trigger other people, especially because the legal and social issues surrounding digital abuse challenge us to confront difficult and disturbing issues in ways I can’t always predict in advance. Individualized warnings might also bias a reader’s analysis when responding to the questions following each dilemma. As a result, I offer this general content warning here and encourage readers to be in the right headspace—whatever that might mean to you—when engaging with these dilemmas.

Finally, I welcome any reactions to this book. Please reach out if you think important perspectives are missing or if you find errors or typos. I surely have blind spots in the way I present some topics, plus I lack a professional editor to catch my linguistic blunders. You can contact me at tek@uga.edu with any constructive criticism.

Some of the dilemmas in this book can be addressed without conducting outside research, while others build on materials covered in my Digital Abuse course. If you’d like to see the syllabus designed to accompany these dilemmas, please visit www.thomaskadri.com/digital-abuse.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 5
DILEMMAS 6

  • Noodle Dilemma 6
  • Rong Dilemma 8
  • Nudes Dilemma 10
  • CCTV Dilemma 12
  • MySpice Dilemma 14
  • Modela Dilemma 16
  • TukTuk Dilemma 18
  • Heatwave Dilemma 20
  • Prank Dilemma 22
  • Basement Dilemma 24
  • WhatsUp Dilemma 26
  • Peachy Dilemma 28
  • Bay-Ran Dilemma 30
  • Octopus Dilemma 32
  • MeanBot Dilemma 34
  • Tattoo Dilemma 36
  • GroupUs Dilemma 38
  • Z Dilemma 40
  • Dumbnet Dilemma 42
  • Ransomware Dilemma 44
  • FishLines Dilemma 46
  • Nasal Dilemma 48
  • Scraping Dilemma 50
  • Paz Dilemma 52
  • Hiroverse Dilemma 56
  • Fumble Dilemma 60

EPILOGUE: IMAGERY & TECHNOLOGY 64

Publication Date

4-10-2024

City

Athens, GA

Keywords

open educational resources, digital abuse, networked technology, cyberstalking, surveillance, civil rights, consumer protection, cybercrime, free speech, privacy, private self-governance

Disciplines

Internet Law | Privacy Law | Science and Technology Law

Comments

This book is published with a Creative Commons NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. Support to create this book came from a University of Georgia Provost’s Affordable Course Materials Grant.

Giving Back

If you use this book, I hope you’ll consider donating some of the money you’ll save to one of the following causes (or another cause of your choosing):

  • Project Safe, which works in and around the Athens community to tackle domestic violence. Project Safe’s executive director is also a Georgia Law alum!

  • Project South, which seeks to combat racial and economic injustice by cultivating social movements in the South.

Acknowledgments

This book incorporates material that also appears in Cybercrime Scenarios (2024), which I co-authored with Samuel Won. Without Samuel’s work, neither of these books would be what they are. He worked tirelessly, with great care and creativity, to help me craft the fact patterns and brainstorm answers to the questions they raise. I’m hugely grateful for his work and support.

I also wish to thank Larkin Carden, Katie Davis, Courtney Hogan, Noah Nix, Navroz Tharani, and Davis Wright for contributing to this book. Sarah Burns provided scrupulous feedback. Natalia Pires was my emotional rock and constant champion. And the smart folks at the Midjourney research lab made the mind-boggling technology that helped me create the images you’ll find within.

This book was designed for my Digital Abuse seminar at the University of Georgia School of Law. For helping to inspire my syllabus in that course, I’d like to thank Danielle Citron, Mary Anne Franks, Karen Levy, Emily Prifogle, and Ethan Zuckerman, all of whose syllabi helped me when shaping my own. I’m also immensely grateful to Amanda Levendowski for her feedback on pedagogy and course curation. And I thank James Grimmelmann, whose own affordable casebook, Internet Law: Cases and Problems, has shaped the way I engage with many of these topics.

Dilemmas in Digital Abuse

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