In a column for The Hill, Neil Richards discusses recent fallout from YouTube star Logan Paul after he published video of what appears to be a dead body in Japan's so-called "suicide forest." The incident, Richards states, encapsulates the significant issues with user-generated content and speaks to the inability of laws to keep up with the digital era. “Paul’s story is exceptional, but for many people it underlined the open questions we have about privacy in the digital age," Richards writes. "At a time when everyone seems equipped with smartphones capable of high-definition video capture, the boundaries between public and private in the physical world have blurred.” Richards suggests that the development of a consumer protection law for the digital age would prove beneficial by establishing “baseline rules designed to protect people from offensive invasions of privacy and the mostly unchecked power of social media companies.”
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