Your relationships with your devices are about to get complicated. Remote operability of smart-devices introduces new actors into the previously intimate relationship between the user and the device—the operators. The Internet of Things (IOT) also allows operators to personalize a specific smart-device for a specific user. This Article discusses the legal and social opportunities and challenges that remote operability and personalization of smart-devices bring forth.
Personalization of smart-devices combines the dynamic personalization of code with the influential personalization of physical space. It encourages operators to remotely modify the smart-device and influence specific users’ behaviors. This has significant implications for the creation and enforcement of law: personalization of smart-devices facilitates the application of law on spaces and activities that were previously unreachable, thereby also paving the way for the legalization of previously unregulated spaces and activities.
The Article also distinguishes between two kinds of smart-devices operators: ordinary and prime-operators. It identifies different kinds of ordinary operators and modes of constraints they can impose on users. It then normatively discusses the distribution of first-order and second-order legal powers between ordinary operators.
Finally, the Article introduces the prime-operators of smart-devices. Prime-operators have informational, computational, and economic advantages that uniquely enable them to influence millions of smart-devices and extract considerable social value from their operation. They also hold unique moderating powers—they govern how other operators and users operate the smart-devices, and thereby influence all interactions mediated by smart-devices. The Article discusses the nature and role of prime-operators and explores paths to regulate them.
Published in the DePaul Law Review, Vol. 70, Issue 3 (Spring 2021), pp. 497-549. This paper originated in the Global Tech Law: Selected Topics Seminar.
