Heather Patterson

I'm a postdoctoral fellow at NYU's Information Law Institute, where I research legal, social, and cognitive aspects of personal information sharing and information flows. Broadly, my work focuses on how people manage privacy and information flows when navigating emerging, untamed socio-technological environments, from “smart” homes equipped with highly sensitive electrical meters to brick & mortar and online services implementing face recognition and other biometric identification practices. I’m currently focusing on health apps and wearable self-quanitification sensors, looking particularly at how people make decisions about sharing health data across a range of social media platforms, and how their judgments and preferences could inform privacy-protective social policy.