Salomé Viljoen

Salomé Viljoen is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches and writes about contracts, privacy, commercial surveillance and data governance.

Viljoen works on the law and political economy of data and artificial intelligence (AI). She is especially interested in platform power, how information law structures inequality, and how law theorizes data about people (i.e. “social data”). Some of her recent and forthcoming work develops a theory of affirmative, socially beneficial uses of social data and examines the role of public agencies in gathering, governing, and using social data as a form of public governance. Other recent and forthcoming work considers under what kinds of conditions the datafication of social life is morally or legally wrongful.

Broadly, she is interested in what legal status social data enjoys, what kinds of legal interests social data production and use implicates, and how the law does (and should) regulate the digital economy.

Viljoen’s academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in law reviews like the Yale Law Journal and the Columbia Law Review, as well as in peer-reviewed technology and society venues like Big Data & Society and the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. She also writes essays in places like Nature, the Guardian, Logic Magazine and Phenomenal World.