Foreword

For a fourth volume, The Student Journal of Information Privacy Law ("SJIPL") is publishing student-authored work that addresses pressing and novel issues in the rapidly moving world of technology, privacy law and the social challenges that accompany those changes.Privacy law has evolved beyond a narrow industry, creating ongoing complexities for lawyers, technologists and companies of every size.Priorities in government and corporate strategy have experienced pendulum swings and uncertainty around technology.These fluctuations affect the most significant questions in individual privacy, deprioritizing regulation and pushing for innovation at the potential cost of individual protections.1 Further, criticism of existing legislation has caused delays in enforcement and implementation of critical safeguards. 2 When privacy and accountability are deprioritized, the costs are rarely abstract: they show up in unequal treatment, exploitative design, unchecked data practices, and diminished recourse for people harmed by irresponsibly designed and unregulated systems.Addressing some of these problems are the following four articles included in Issue One of Volume Four of SJIPL.First, Kirsten Mettler's Civil Rights and the EdTech Revolution presents the case for holding EdTech companies directly responsible for creating tools used by institutions that result in discriminatory behavior that violates federal protections.Second, Steven Hammerton's Friend or Tether: How Regulation Can Cut the Strings of Manipulative Chatbots examines the repeated cases of pernicious chatbots and large language models' involvement in the deaths of vulnerable individuals, arguing that existing frameworks for regulation can protect users from future harms without creating unmanageable restrictions for the technology industry.Third, Matthias Connelly's Can AI Fix Money Laundering?The Case for Federated Intelligence in Financial Crime Prevention advocates for the use of advanced technology to address the overwhelming percentage of illegal financial activity that goes undetected and unaddressed by government.Finally, John Blegen's Kennelly v. Mid Coast and the Law Court's Erroneous Ruling on the Discoverability of Redacted Patient Info takes a critical view of a recent Maine Law Court decision that hindered litigation for injured individuals, arguing that the Court undervalued the need for the discovery and overestimated the impact of the discovery on individual privacy.