Payments to Not Parent? Noncustodial Parents as the Recipients of Child Support

Parents are turning to autonomous vehicles (AVs) to shuttle their children around, seeing them as a safe and convenient option. AVs promise increased mobility for children but bring with them unparalleled surveillance risks. As parents embrace in-cabin monitoring and location tracking to enhance safety, they also—often unknowingly—authorize the mass collection, retention, and potential disclosure of their children’s most intimate data.

This Essay presents the first case study of children’s privacy in AVs, serving as a lens to critique the prevailing reliance on parental notice and choice as the cornerstone of children's data protection. Drawing on privacy theory, surveillance studies, and child development literature, the Essay argues that the notice-and-choice framework fails to account for children’s distinct privacy interests, particularly when the data collected may be retained indefinitely, repurposed by law enforcement, or sold to data brokers. The Essay calls for real limits on data collection, meaningful restrictions on sharing, and mandatory deletion rules. These principles extend beyond AVs to the technological ecosystem now shaping childhood in the digital age.

Search costs matter and are reflected in many areas of law. For example, most disclosure requirements economize on search costs. A homeowner who must disclose the presence of termites saves a potential buyer, and perhaps many such buyers, from spending money to search, or inspect, the property. Similarly, requirements to reveal expected miles per gallon, or risks posed by a drug, economize on search costs. But these examples point to simple strategies and costs that can be minimized or entirely avoided with some legal intervention. Law can do better and take account of more subtle things once sophisticated search strategies are understood. This Essay introduces such search strategies and their implications for law.

When one thinks of government, what comes to mind are familiar general-purpose entities like states, counties, cities, and townships. But more than half of the 90,000 governments in the United States are strikingly different: They are “special-purpose” governments that do one thing, such as supply water, fight fire, or pick up the trash. These entities remain understudied, and they present at least two puzzles. First, special-purpose governments are difficult to distinguish from entities that are typically regarded as business organizations—such as consumer cooperatives—and thus underscore the nebulous border between “public” and “private” enterprise. Where does that border lie? Second, special-purpose governments typically provide only one service, in sharp contrast to general-purpose governments. There is little in between the two poles—such as two-, three-, or four-purpose governments. Why? This Article answers those questions—and, in so doing, offers a new framework for thinking about special-purpose government.