(Update: Calls Closed) Apply Now! Undergraduate Fritz Fellowships — FOIA for Digital Platforms Project
Profs Meg Leta Jones (Communication, Culture, & Technology program), Paul Ohm (Institute for Tech Law & Policy), and Jonathan Healey (Ethics Lab) are pleased to announce a call for two Undergraduate Fritz Fellows in support of an interdisciplinary research project concerned with transparency law and information economy governance. The project, “FOIA for Digital Platforms,” is supported by the Tech & Society Initiative at Georgetown for 2022–2023.
Each Fellowship includes funding for research full-time during Summer 2022 and continuing part-time through Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. All undergraduate students are welcome to apply.
Project Description:
The FOIA for Digital Platforms Fellows team will support research on, events for, and promotion of a freedom of information law for the private sector. The research will include two research papers, one an assessment of Privacy Act requests using FOIA requests and the other a global comparison of freedom of information laws that reach the private sector. The research will be generated by and contribute to three events at a technology law conference, history of technology conference, and an event at Georgetown. As the work develops, the Fellows will organize workshops on campus and outreach in the form of a web page.
Fritz Family Fellows Program:
The Fritz Family Fellows Program is a joint effort among Georgetown’s three campuses and nine schools to harness technology for the betterment of humanity. The fellowship program aims to cultivate the next generation of leaders with expertise in the social impacts of technology, and build a network of public interest technologists who learn from and support each other’s work.
Hourly Rate for Undergraduates: $18/hour
Each year, all Fritz Fellows also participate in the following program events:
Attendance at the Fritz Orientation (Friday, September 9th, 9AM - 1PM)
Monthly check-ins with the Fritz Fellowship Coordinator
Participation at the Spring Fritz Orientation (Date TBD)
Attendance at the monthly cohort convenings (not required but encouraged)
How to apply:
Apply on HoyaWorks. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis so please submit as early as possible. This application will close on May 6th, 2022 at 9:00pm Eastern.
Questions about the FOIA for Digital Platforms project? We’d love to hear from you! Send a note to ethicslab@georgetown.edu and we’ll be in touch.
For general questions about the fellowship program, please contact fritzfellows@georgetown.edu.
Full Description:
Networked information technologies have been part of profound transformations in economic, political, and organizational structures and faced little public accountability, public oversight, or legal challenge. Developing new governance frameworks is a key animating problem for those that work on Tech & Society issues across disciplines at Georgetown. An important component of these new governance frameworks must include new forms of transparency. Our contribution to this larger initiative is the consideration, development, and promotion of new freedom of information laws that would apply to the private sector, notably surveillance capitalist companies built on new networked business models and that have circumvented legal institutions established to manage industrial revolution harms. Despite profiting from invasive surveillance practices, these technology platform firms have successfully maneuvered around and reshaped public and private systems of governance in the shadows to serve their interests.
The FOIA for Digital Platforms Fritz Fellows will support two research projects. The first is a creative, empirically based assessment of the distinction between Privacy Act requests and FOIA, using FOIA requests to determine the use of Privacy Act requests. The Privacy Act is hailed as an important meaningful data privacy law in the U.S. Considered a meaningful form of individual control over data, the Privacy Act allows citizens to access their personal records and seek correction. But the impact of the Privacy Act is understudied and its reputation as a governance tool is under-researched. The Freedom of Information Act, on the other hand, is a richly understood, empirically researched, and notably impactful piece of legislation that has served as a methodological calling card for journalists and civil liberties groups, as well as a powerful (though flawed) governance tool. By comparing the use of the Privacy Act to the Freedom of Information Act, we hope to make clear the need for transparency tools beyond individual access requests. The Fellows will organize and submit the FOIA requests to around twenty agencies, under the supervision of Professor Jones. The Fellows will also locate, request, and copy the Privacy Act annual reports each agency is required to produce but have been issued to various government entities since the 1970s and many not easily discoverable. The second research project will look closely at the FOIA laws around the world that reach the private sector in some context. These laws have been identified by Professor Jones and the Fellows will research the legislative history of these laws and any accompanying case law. The Fellows will serve as a research assistant or co-author of both articles that will be submitted to highly ranked journals and both turned into either a video or interactive piece or op-ed for the web.
Three events are planned for the FOIA for Digital Platforms project. The Fellows will support logistics and substance for a pre-conference workshop before the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. The workshop, co-organized by Professors Ohm and Jones, is dedicated to innovative forms of transparency for new governance frameworks. The Fellows will help design and organize the panel on FOIA for Digital Platforms. The second event will be a roundtable at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) designed by Professor Jones, Visiting Professor danah boyd, and Ethics Lab. The SHOT roundtable will probe methods and challenges to using FOIA for understanding the history of computing. The Fellows will attend the conference in New Orleans and support logistics and substance of the roundtable. The final event will be one at Georgetown hosted by Ethics Lab and supported by the Fellows that will bring together archivists, tech journalists, and FOIA researchers, with Georgetown faculty and students.