Lawyers and legal academics may be surprised to learn that Thomson Reuters, owners of the Westlaw electronic law library, sells its data to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, and reserves the right in its privacy policy to share browsing history and search terms with law enforcement agencies. My colleague Sarah Lamdan explores the ethical issues for lawyers and the legal publishers in a recent paper, "When Westlaw Fuels ICE Surveillance: Ethics in the Big Data Policing Era."
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Is Lexis any different?
The Lexis privacy policy is less cavalier about sharing data with government enforcement agencies. Lexis will share personal data to “meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or other legal obligation.” The Westlaw data sharing language is quoted in the article.