CERL Affiliated Faculty Anita L. Allen, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, received a 2023 Privacy Papers for Policymakers (PPPM) Award for her article in the Yale Law Journal Forum entitled “Dismantling the ‘Black Opticon’: Privacy, Race, Equity, and Online Data-Protection Reform,” which assesses the vulnerabilities to bias and discrimination that African Americans face in the digital public sphere. According to Prof. Allen:

I conclude that although we must welcome these major reforms and proposals for advancing online equity, privacy, and consumer-data protection, grounds for concern remain when reforms are assessed against imperatives for specifically combatting African American disadvantage. Whether and to what extent contemplated legal and institutional reforms would free African Americans from the Black Opticon remains an open question. However, the current era of privacy and data-protection reform presents a paramount opportunity to shape law and legal institutions that will better serve African Americans’ platform-governance-related interests no less than, and along with, the interests of others.

A graduate of Harvard Law with a PhD from the University of Michigan in Philosophy, Allen is internationally renowned as an expert on philosophical dimensions of privacy and data protection law, ethics, bioethics, legal philosophy, women’s rights, and diversity in higher education. She was Penn’s Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013-2020 and chaired the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council. Read her bio here.