Archive for the ‘Google & Search Engines’ Category
Censorship on the March
posted by Derek Bambauer
Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both online and in realspace (I saw my colleague and friend Jonathan Askin headed to protest outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand). Many of the protesters argue that America is headed in the direction of authoritarian states such as China, Iran, and Bahrain in censoring the Net. The problem, though, is that America is not alone: most Western democracies are censoring the Internet. Britain does it for child pornography. France: hate speech. The EU is debating a proposal to allow “flagging” of objectionable content for ISPs to ban. Australia’s ISPs are engaging in pre-emptive censorship to prevent even worse legislation from passing. India wants Facebook, Google, and other online platforms to remove any content the government finds problematic.
Censorship is on the march, in democracies as well as dictatorships. With this movement we see, finally, the death of the American myth of free speech exceptionalism. We have viewed ourselves as qualitatively different – as defenders of unfettered expression. We are not. Even without SOPA and PROTECT IP, we are seizing domain names, filtering municipal wi-fi, and using funding to leverage colleges and universities to filter P2P. The reasons for American Internet censorship differ from those of France, South Korea, or China. The mechanism of restriction does not. It is time for us to be honest: America, too, censors. I think we can, and should, defend the legitimacy of our restrictions – the fight on-line and in Congress and in the media shows how we differ from China – but we need to stop pretending there is an easy line to be drawn between blocking human rights sites and blocking Rojadirecta or Dajaz1.
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 18, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki
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The Fight For Internet Censorship
posted by Derek Bambauer
Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited.
Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to say, never. Media sources credit the Obama administration’s opposition to some of the more noxious parts of SOPA, such as its DNSSEC-killing filtering provisions, and also the tech community’s efforts to raise awareness. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been working overtime in reporting on SOPA; Wikipedia and Reddit are adopting a blackout to draw attention; even the New York City techies are holding a demonstration in front of the offices of Senators Kirstin Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Schumer has been bailing water on the SOPA front after one of his staffers told a local entrepreneur that the senator supports Internet censorship. Props for candor.) I think the Obama administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the bill is important, but I suspect that a crowded legislative calendar is also playing a significant role.
Of course, the PROTECT IP Act is still floating around the Senate. It’s less worse than SOPA, in the same way that Transformers 2 is less worse than Transformers 3. (You still might want to see what else Netflix has available.) And sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy has suggested that the DNS filtering provisions of the bill be studied – after the legislation is passed. It’s much more efficient, legislatively, to regulate first and then see if it will be effective. A more cynical view is that Senator Leahy’s move is a public relations tactic designed to undercut the opposition, but no one wants to say so to his face.
I am not opposed to Internet censorship in all situations, which means I am often lonely at tech-related events. But these bills have significant flaws. They threaten to badly weaken cybersecurity, an area that is purportedly a national priority (and has been for 15 years). They claim to address a major threat to IP rightsholders despite the complete lack of data that the threat is anything other than chimerical. They provide scant procedural protections for accused infringers, and confer extraordinary power on private rightsholders – power that will, inevitably, be abused. And they reflect a significant public choice imbalance in how IP and Internet policy is made in the United States.
Surprisingly, the Obama administration has it about right: we shouldn’t reject Internet censorship as a regulatory mechanism out of hand, but we should be wary of it. This isn’t the last stage of this debate – like Wesley in The Princess Bride, SOPA-like legislation is only mostly dead. (And, if you don’t like the Obama administration’s position today, just wait a day or two.)
Cross-posted at Info/Law.
January 16, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0
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Stanford Law Review Online: Don’t Break the Internet
posted by Stanford Law Review
The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a piece by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don’t Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — “share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”
They write:
These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.
Read the full article, Don’t Break the Internet by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, at the Stanford Law Review Online.
Note: Corrected typo in first paragraph.
December 19, 2011 at 3:14 am
Tags: banks, credit card companies, DNS, DNS filtering, domain name seizures, domain name servers, domain names, financial institutions, Intellectual Property, Internet, internet security, internet stability, IP, IP addresses, IP rights, online advertisers, PROTECT IP Act, search engine censorship, search engines, SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, World Wide Web
Posted in: Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, International & Comparative Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Law School (Law Reviews), Movies & Television, Property Law, Social Network Websites
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The Pluses of Google+
posted by Ari Waldman
I love shiny new toys. Sometimes, its a crisp new book (Pauline Maier, for one… thanks Gerard!); other times, it’s something plush and adorable, like the yellow Angry Birds doll my 5-year-old nephew “bought” for me last month. Last week, it was Google+.
Google+ is social networking done the Google way. The soft launch is part of Google’s long-running master plan to enter the social networking market and try to do it better than the basically moribund MySpace and the supposedly plateauing Facebook. We are told that Google+’s chief asset is its ability to simulate real relationships, and our different interactions with different types of friends, on the Internet.
Google+ introduces us to circles, where you can take the 800 or so “friends” you would have on Facebook and break them down on your own terms. You have friends, acquaintances, co-workers, well-wishers, frenemies, those-guys-you-met-at-that-terrible-bar, whatever. And, you can use these classifications to tailor your interactions, thus avoiding the problem of your mother, sister or child accessing a picture meant for your pals.
There are also sparks, which are news and video aggregators. It is easy enough to tell a spark what you enjoy doing when you’re not working on important affairs of state, thus allowing you to spend “more time wasting time without wasting your time looking how to waste time.”
And, hangouts are Google+’s attempts to recreate chance encounters. I’m not sure these are completely functioning yet, though. Remember when you used to visit the mall or walked through the West Village and ran into someone you hadn’t seen in years? Hangouts attempt to turn an online social networking into a place where anything social can happen, only with Google+, you “bump” into someone through a video message.
Let’s assume for the moment that all this works as well as we hope and that Google+ allows us to recreate real life in the virtual realm. Facebook is not really trying to recreate real life and simulate precisely how we interact with one another in the physical world. It is trying to supplement it, foster new interactions in new ways. At times, we don’t like that. Facebook’s forced socialization and privacy issues give many social networkers pause. There are many other digital technologies that seek to supplement our physical social world. Grindr, a geolocating social networking service for gay men, is one such example. Grindr allows its members to be out and about, smartphone in hand and find other gay men in the vicinity. Its purpose is to eschew traditional social networking that keeps you saddled to your computer and to let you physically meet people you have something in common with who may be living across the street or down the block. It is interactive, mobile and a multi-purpose tool.
So, Google+ is trying to forge a different path, i.e., using the Internet as an extension of our physical social circles and to keep those circles the way they are now. Of course, that is not to say that Google+ will not bring us closer to new friends — we can still interact with friends of friends, let people we barely know into our network and share content with whomever we please. But, Google+’s chief draw appears to be its greater fidelity to real life. If that is true in the long run, as Google works out the kinks and listens to its users, is that what we want in our online social networks?
The benefits are clear — we can avoid the grandmother seeing you at the bar problem. But there are also disadvantages — we lose the liberating potential of reaching new people. What do you think?
July 20, 2011 at 10:46 am
Posted in: Culture, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Social Network Websites
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Beyond Innovation and Competition, Health IT Edition
posted by Frank Pasquale
Last year I published a piece called “Beyond Innovation and Competition,” questioning the dominance of those values. Economists celebrate innovation and competition as the main source of future growth. Innovation has become the central focus of Internet law and policy. While leading commentators sharply divide on the best way to promote innovation, they routinely elevate its importance. Business writers have celebrated search engines, social networks, and tech startups as model corporations, bringing creative destruction and “disruptive innovation” in their wake. Maximum innovation is the goal, and competition is billed as the best way of achieving it. Players in the vast and dynamic tech marketplace are supposed to constantly strive to innovate in order to attract consumers away from rivals.
In the piece, I explain how both competition and innovation can destroy value, and undermine values. There are many social values (including privacy, transparency, predictability, and stability), and companies can compete for profits in ways that erode those values. In an era of inequality and hall-of-mirrors stock market valuations, innovations of marginal or negative impact on society at large can be vastly overvalued by a stampede of fickle investors.
The shortcomings of the innovation and competition story also play out in health information technology. Stimulus legislation in 2009 provided many carrots and sticks for doctors to digitize their recordkeeping systems, ranging from bonuses now to reimbursement haircuts later this decade if they fail to implement the technology. Congress structured the incentives to encourage a competitive and innovative marketplace in health information technology. But many doctors are shying away from implementation, in part because they fear that the fast and loose ethics of the market can’t mesh with a medical culture of constant commitment to quality care.
Case Studies in Physician Caution
Susan Jaffe’s article for the Center for Public Integrity examines doctors’ fears about adopting any given software suite. According to Jaffe, “570 different electronic health systems certified by private organizations for non-hospital settings may be used to qualify for the” stimulus funds. The long-term consequences of the choice make the jam-shopping examples in Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice seem quaint:
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July 7, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Health Law, Technology
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Scoring Ourselves to Economic Death
posted by Danielle Citron
In The New York Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom asks readers to “imagine a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are.” That number would help determine our success at getting a job, hotel-room upgrade, break on a service, or free samples at the store. As Rosenbloom tells us, imagine no more, companies, such as Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader, are mining our social media activities and assigning us influence scores. Social scoring is based on our online social network activity, including the number of followers, friends, and the extent to which our online activity gets people moving. If if you recommend a salon to your social network friends and they follow suit, your good word has two functions. You’re doing a good thing for your friends and the salon (let’s hope), and now you’re doing good for you. Because you have inspired people to take action, your influence score may rise. In the present, people with high scores get preferential treatment by retailers. More than 2,500 marketers are now using Klout’s data. Audi will begin offering Facebook users promotions based on their Klout score. The Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to a show. In the future, those scores could be used by prospective employers, friends, and dates.
On the one hand, this market trend has something important to commend — its visibility. Consumers can find out their influence scores and work to raise them. By contrast, the impact of behavioral advertising is often hidden. We are tracked and scored in databases and have no idea how it shakes out. Joe Turow’s excellent book Niche Envy explains that consumers know very little about how their data personalizes market transactions. Some individuals may end up as haves and others as have-nots, but neither group knows the extent of it. As Turow explains, “our simple corner store is turning into a Marrakech bazaar–except that the merchant has been analyzing our diaries while we negotiate blindfolded, behind a curtain, through a translator.” On the other hand, the information isn’t perfect and the algorithms secret so people may waste time doing things that they believe will raise their scores but don’t. But that isn’t really troubling, unless every job or blog post had the effect we hoped it might. What’s troubling is the trend’s implications for society and culture. It seems old school to say that people blog, make friends, and engage in online chats to play, experiment, and create culture. Now, they may feel pressured to do all of these things as a matter of economic necessity. We may forgo experimentation for product endorsements, and idle chatter for better job prospects. This makes our children’s choice to engage with social media seem like less of choice than a carefully cultivated necessity. It also spells far more trouble for people who are already victimized, those who cyber mobs target with lies, threats, technical attacks, and privacy invasions. They go offline or write under pseudonyms to protect themselves. We now know that those choices (if we can call it that) cost more economically than they already do aside from the many other costs that my work discusses. I imagine there’s more to this influence score story but I thought I’d share my initial take.
June 28, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0
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Bullet, So Not Dodged
posted by Danielle Citron
The question that I had been dreading came at last: “Mom, can I have a Facebook page?” My daughter provided a strong defense: she’s 13, so she meets Facebook’s Terms of Service age requirement; she’s nearly an adult in her religion’s eyes (her bat mitzvah is in a week); past practices proves she’s responsible; and well, she feels ready. (And I just discovered, she’s done her homework: see this Yahoo Answers! “My mom won’t let me get a Facebook page, how do I convince her?” thread that I found on my computer).
Next came the conversation. We talked about how increasingly social media activity is part of one’s life’s biography. Anything said and done in social network spaces becomes part of who you are in our Information Age. Colleges may ask for your Facebook password. Over 70% of employers look at social media data for interviewing and hiring (and sad to say, the outcomes are grim for applicants who over 60% of the time don’t get the interview or job due to social network profiles). It’s not just what you post that speaks volumes — your social network (friends and their friends) tells some of your story for you. There goes any control that you thought you had. FB users often wrestle with whether they should de-friend those whose online personas don’t match their sensibilities (or the way in which they want others to perceive them). This means that users need to keep a careful eye on their friends’ profiles (as well as ever-changing privacy settings).
That’s a lot of responsibility. Or, as Bill Keller of the New York Times put it when he allowed his 13-year old daughter to join Facebook, he felt “a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.“ Beyond the potential privacy and reputational concerns that accompany social media use, an online life has other potential perils, like overuse (and thus inattention to studies, face-to-face family time, etc.) that cyber-pessimists underscore (see Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows). And bullying, serious harassment, bigotry increasingly appear in mainstream social media in ways that kids can’t necessarily avoid (my work explores those problems, see here, here, and here, as well as terrific work by guest bloggers Ari Waldman and Mary Anne Franks). Of course, there’s also lots of positive stuff emerging from these networked spaces. Social media outlets like Facebook allow us to enact our personalities. They let us express ourselves in ever-changing and expanding ways. FB and other outlets host civic engagement as Helen Norton and I have emphasized.
I wonder, too, if my kid has a meaningful choice. Can digital natives really stay away from social media if all of their friends socialize there? And will employers and colleges expect that applicants partake in these activities because everyone else does? Someday, will resisting having a Facebook profile express something negative about you? Will it signal that you’re not socially adjusted or successful? As Scott Peppet underscores in his work, we may be forced to give up our privacy to show that we are indeed healthy, social, smart, and the like. That’s a lot to process, right? I’m going to chew on this a while. Your thoughts are most welcome!
June 4, 2011 at 11:19 am
Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0
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Cyberharassment’s Waterloo
posted by Ari Waldman
I begin my Co-Op blogging stint with deep appreciation for Danielle Citron’s invitation and for the entire Co-Op community’s indulgence. I am honored to be a small part of a wonderful online community that brings out the best in us and, for that matter, Web 2.0. My name is Ari, I am a Legal Scholar Teaching Fellow (just like a VAP) at California Western School of Law and I am a student of the interplay among the First Amendment, the Internet and other modern technologies and their effects on minority populations, like gays and lesbians. I go on the professor job market this Fall. I have a weekly blog (every Wednesday) over at the country’s most popular gay news site, Towleroad, for those interested in perspectives on LGBT legal issues for a mass audience. I also have a healthy relationship with physical fitness and an unhealthy relationship with the store Jack Spade. If there’s counseling for the latter, I’d appreciate a reference. Kidding…
For my month of blogging, I hope to engage with you in a few conversations, mostly about cyberharassment and the First Amendment, and hopefully with a healthy dose of humor.
My current project is the third in a series of projects about cyberharassment. The previous articles, available here, address the effects of cyberharassment on LGBT youth, argue for the use of affirmative “soft power” rather than after-the-fact criminalization to solve the problem and create a new analytical framework for adjudicating student free speech defenses to a school’s authority to punish cyberaggressors. Now I am considering the effect that cyberharassment, particularly harassment of a minority group, has on civic participation and the realization of democratic values. I argue that Internet intermediaries self-regulation of their sites and services to filter out hate, sexual harassment and other aggression conforms with long-standing First Amendment values.
Like President Obama likes to say, let me be clear. I do not mean to suggest that the First Amendment applies as a limit on the activities of private actors like Facebook or MySpace or Google; rather, I think that contrary to libertarian First Amendment scholars, we can expect these online intermediaries to regulate content and say that doing so reflects the democratic interests that underly the First Amendment.
Here’s the draft argument in brief that I am currently working out: The view of the Internet as an unencumbered and unfettered town square deserving the same Rawlsian liberal approach to free speech is wrong. Every online interaction is governed by intermediaries of varying kinds, all of which are the filters through which our online speech makes it through to our online communities. Traditional intermediaries have the power to regulate content consistent with the First Amendment, especially when not doing so would interfere with their and their users’ ability to participate in civil society. We see this more Aristotelian/communitarian approach to First Amendment values in intermediary jurisprudence — from publishers to book stores, and from schools to workplaces. And, like schools and workplaces, which can regulate their members’ speech in order to fulfill the institutions’ purposes, so too can online intermediaries like Facebook.
This project is in the early stages, and I always welcome comments/suggestions/evisceration of the argument. More to come…
I look forward to continuing this and other discussions with this splendid community.
June 1, 2011 at 10:52 am
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Legal Theory, LGBT, Web 2.0
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Beyond Cyber-Utopianism
posted by Frank Pasquale
What encapsulates the ethos of Silicon Valley? Promoting his company’s prowess at personalization, Mark Zuckerberg once said that, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Scott Cleland argues that “you can’t trust Google, Inc.,” compiling a critical mass of dubious practices that might seem quite understandable each taken alone. Apple’s “reality distortion field” is the topic of numerous satires. As the internet increasingly converges through these three companies, what are the values driving their decisionmaking?
For some boosters, these are not terribly important questions: the logic of the net itself assures progress. But for Chris Lehmann, the highflying internet-academic-industrial complex has failed to think critically about a consolidating, commercialized cyberspace. Previously featured on this blog for his book, Lehmann’s review of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is fairly scathing:
With the emergence of Web 2.0–style social media (things like Facebook, Twitter and text messaging), Shirky writes, we inhabit an unprecedented social reality, “a world where public and private media blend together, where professional and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” This Valhalla of voluntary intellectual labor represents a stupendous crowdsourcing, or pooling, of the planet’s mental resources, hence the idea of the “cognitive surplus.” . . .
[But why] assign any special value to an hour spent online in the first place? Given the proven models of revenue on the web, it’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of those trillion-plus online hours are devoted to gambling and downloading porn. Yes, the networked web world does produce some appreciable social goods, such as the YouTubed “It Gets Better” appeals to bullied gay teens contemplating suicide. But there’s nothing innate in the character of digital communication that favors feats of compassion and creativity; for every “It Gets Better” video that goes viral, there’s an equally robust traffic in white nationalist, birther and jihadist content online. . . .
May 22, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Technology
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Behind the Filter Bubble: Hidden Maps of the Internet
posted by Frank Pasquale
A small corner of the world of search took another step toward personalization today, as Bing moved to give users the option to personalize their results by drawing on data from their Facebook friends:
Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This “Friend Effect” is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle.
Today, Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search. Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches.
The announcement almost perfectly coincides with the release of Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble, which argues that “as web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview.” I have earlier worried about both excessive personalization and integration of layers of the web (such as social and search, or carrier and device). I think Microsoft may be reaching for one of very few strategies available to challenge Google’s dominance in search. But I also fear that this is one more example of the “filter bubble” Pariser worries about.
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May 16, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Google & Search Engines, Media Law, Privacy, Technology
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UCLA Law Review Vol. 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)
posted by UCLA Law Review
Volume 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)
Articles
| Digital Exhaustion | Aaron Perzanowski & Jason Schultz | 889 |
| Fixing Inconsistent Paternalism Under Federal Employment Discrimination Law | Craig Robert Senn | 947 |
| Awakening the Press Clause | Sonja R. West | 1025 |
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April 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Posted in: Amazon, Employment Law, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Law Rev (UCLA), Media Law
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Technology Musings
posted by Taunya Banks
Recently the New York Times carried a front page story about an eighth grade girl who foolishly took a nude picture of herself with her cell phone and sent it to a fickle boy – sexting. The couple broke up but her picture circulated among her schools mates with a text message “Ho Alert” added by a frenemy. In less than 24 hours, “hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it. In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost.” The three students who set off the “viral outbreak” were charged with disseminating child pornography, a Class C felony.
The story struck a nerve, not only with the affected community, but with the Times’ readers as well. Stories about the misuse and dangers of technology provide us with opportunities to educate our students, and us. In a Washington State sexting incident, for example, the teen charged had to prepared a public service statement warning other teens about sexting to avoid harsher criminal penalties. But the teen’s nude photo is still floating around. Information has permanence on the internet.
Few of us appreciate how readily obtainable our personal information is on the internet. Read the rest of this post »
April 3, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Tags: academia, Google, Law School
Posted in: Culture, Google & Search Engines, Law School (Teaching), Legal Ethics, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Uncategorized
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Vaidhyanathan’s Googlization: A Must-Read on Where “Knowing” is Going
posted by Frank Pasquale
Google’s been in the news a lot the past month. Concerned about the quality of their search results, they’re imposing new penalties on “content farms” and certain firms, including JC Penney and Overstock.com. Accusations are flying fast and furious; the “antichrist of Silicon Valley” has flatly told the Googlers to “stop cheating.”
As the debate heats up and accelerates in internet time, it’s a pleasure to turn to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything, a carefully considered take on the company composed over the past five years. After this week is over, no one is going to really care whether Google properly punished JC Penney for scheming its way to the top non-paid search slot for “grommet top curtains.” But our culture will be influenced in ways large and small by Google’s years of dominance, whatever happens in coming years. I don’t have time to write a full review now, but I do want to highlight some key concepts in Googlization, since they will have lasting relevance for studies of technology, law, and media for years to come.
Cryptopicon
Dan Solove helped shift the privacy conversation from “Orwell to Kafka” in a number of works over the past decade. Other scholars of surveillance have first used, and then criticized, the concept of the “Panopticon” as a master metaphor for the conformity-inducing pressures of ubiquitous monitoring. Vaidhyanathan observes that monitoring is now so ubiquitous, most people have given up trying to conform. As he observes,
[T]he forces at work in Europe, North America, and much of the rest of the world are the opposite of a Panopticon: they involve not the subjection of the individual to the gaze of a single, centralized authority, but the surveillance of the individual, potentially by all, always by many. We have a “cryptopticon” (for lack of a better word). Unlike Bentham’s prisoners, we don’t know all the ways in which we are being watched or profiled—we simply know that we are. And we don’t regulate our behavior under the gaze of surveillance: instead, we don’t seem to care.
Of course, that final “we” is a bit overinclusive, for as Vaidhyanathan later shows in a wonderful section on the diverging cultural responses to Google Street View, there are bastions of resistance to the technology:
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March 12, 2011 at 12:38 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Philosophy of Social Science, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Social Network Websites, Technology
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Search Neutrality as Disclosure and Auditing
posted by Frank Pasquale
Search neutrality is on the rise in Europe, and on the ropes in the US (or at least should be, according to James Grimmelmann). We barely have net neutrality here, and the tech press bridles at the thought of a sclerotic DC agency regulating god-like Googlers. I want to question its conventional wisdom, by proving how modest the “search neutrality” agenda is now, and how well it fits with classic ideals of neutrality in law.
There are many reasons to think that Google will continue to dominate the general purpose search field. Sure, searchers and advertisers can access a vibrant field of also-rans. But most users will always want a shot at Google for serious searching and advertising, just as a mobile internet connection is no substitute for a high bandwidth one for many important purposes.
Given these parallels, I’ve compared principles of broadband non-discrimination and search non-discrimination. But virtually every time the term “search neutrality” comes up in conversation, people tend to want to end the argument by saying “there is no one best way to order search results—editorial discretion is built into the process of ranking sites.” (See, for example, Clay Shirky’s response to my position in this documentary.) To critics, a neutral search engine would have to perform the (impossible) task of ranking every site according to some Platonic ideal of merit.
But on my account of neutrality, a neutral search engine must merely avoid certain suspect behaviors, including:
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February 19, 2011 at 11:16 am
Posted in: Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Philosophy of Social Science
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The Ugly Persistence of Internet Celebrity
posted by Danielle Citron
Many desperately try to garner online celebrity. They host You Tube channels devoted to themselves. They share their thoughts in blog postings and on social network sites. They post revealing pictures of themselves on Flickr. To their dismay though, no one pays much attention. But for others, the Internet spotlight finds them and mercilessly refuses to yield ground. For instance, in 2007, a sports blogger obtained a picture of a high-school pole vaulter, Allison Stokke, at a track meet and posted it online. Within days, her picture spread across the Internet, from message boards and sport sites to porn sites and social network profiles. Impostors created fake profiles of Ms. Stokke on social network sites, and Ms. Stokke was inundated with emails from interested suitors and journalists. At the time, Ms. Stokke told the Washington Post that the attention felt “demeaning” because the pictures dominated how others saw her rather than her pole-vaulting accomplishments.
Time’s passage has not helped Stokke shake her online notoriety. Sites continuously updated their photo galleries with pictures of Stokkes taken at track meets. Blogs boasted of finding pictures of Stokke at college with headings like “Your 2010 Allison Stokke Update,” “Allison Stokke’s Halloween Cowgirl Outfit Accentuates the Total Package,” and “Only Known Allison Stokke Cal Picture Found.” Postings include obscene language. For instance, a Google search of her name on a safety setting yields 129,000 results while one with no safety setting has 220,000 hits. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a wiki devoted to her (though Wikipedia has faithfully taken down entries about Ms. Stokke).
January 30, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Technology, Tort Law, Wiki
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The Aftermath of Wikileaks
posted by Danielle Citron
The U.K.’s freedom of information commissioner, Christopher Graham, recently told The Guardian that the WikiLeaks disclosures irreversibly altered the relationship between the state and public. As Graham sees it, the WikiLeaks incident makes clear that governments need to be more open and proactive, “publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn’t know it. . . WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen . . . these are facts that aren’t going away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that.” If U.K. officials take Graham seriously (and I have no idea if they will), the public may see more of government. Whether that more in fact provides insights to empower citizens or simply gives the appearance of transparency is up for grabs.
In the U.S., few officials have called for more transparency after the release of the embassy cables. Instead, government officials have successfully pressured internet intermediaries to drop their support of WikiLeaks. According to Wired, Senator Joe Lieberman, for instance, was instrumental in persuading Amazon.com to kick WikiLeaks off its web hosting service. Senator Lieberman has suggested that Amazon, as well as Visa and and PayPal, came to their own decisions about WikiLeaks. Lieberman noted:
“While corporate entities make decisions based on their obligations to their shareholders, sometimes full consideration of those obligations requires them to act as responsible citizens. We offer our admiration and support to those companies exhibiting courage and patriotism as they face down intimidation from hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks’ philosophy of irresponsible information dumps for the sake of damaging global relationships.”
Unlike the purely voluntary decisions that Internet intermediaries make with regard to cyber hate, see here, Amazon’s response raises serious concerns about what Seth Kreimer has called “censorship by proxy.” Kreimer’s work (as well as Derek Bambauer‘s terrific Cybersieves) explores American government’s pressure on intermediaries to “monitor or interdict otherwise unreachable Internet communications” to aid the “War on Terror.”
Legislators have also sought to ensure opacity of certain governmental information with new regulations. Proposed legislation (spearheaded by Senator Lieberman) would make it a federal crime for anyone to publish the name of U.S. intelligence source. The Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination (SHIELD) Act would amend a section of the Espionage Act that forbids the publication of classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence. The SHIELD Act would extend that prohibition to information on human intelligence, criminalizing the publication of information “concerning the identity of a classified source or information of an element of the intelligence community of the United States” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.
Another issue on the horizon may be the immunity afforded providers or users of interactive computer services who publish content created by others under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. An aside: section 230 is not inconsistent with the proposed SHIELD Act as it excludes federal criminal claims from its protections. (This would not mean that website operators like Julian Assange would be strictly liable for others’ criminal acts on its services; the question would be whether a website operator’s actions violated the SHIELD Act). Now for my main point: Senator Lieberman has expressed an interest in broadening the exemptions to section 230′s immunity to require the removal of certain content, such as videos featuring Islamic extremists. Given his interest and the current concerns about security risks related to online disclosures, Senator Lieberman may find this an auspicious time to revisit section 230′s broad immunity.
January 7, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (National Security), Technology
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Advancing the Fight Against Cyber Hate with Greater Transparency and Clarity about Hate Speech Policies
posted by Danielle Citron
Today, online intermediaries voluntarily seek to combat digital hatred, often addressing hate speech in their Terms of Service Agreements or Community Guidelines. Those agreements and guidelines tend to include vague prohibitions of hate speech. The terms of service for Yahoo!, for instance, requires users of some services to refrain from generating “hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable” content without saying more. Intermediaries can advance the fight against digital hate with more transparency and clarity about the terms of, and harms to be prevented by, their hate speech policies, as well as the consequences of policy violations. With more transparency and clarity, intermediaries can make behavioral expectations more understandable and users can more fully appreciate the significance of digital citizenship, see here, here, here, and here. The more intermediaries and users understand why a particular policy prohibits a certain universe of speech, the more likely they can then put into practice, and adhere to, that policy in a way that achieves those objectives.
Before seeking to provide guidance on how intermediaries might do that, it is important to recognize that efforts to define hate speech raise at least two significant challenges. First, many disagree over which, if any, of the harmful effects potentially generated by such speech are sufficiently serious to warrant action. Second, controversy also remains about the universe of speech that is actually likely to trigger harms deemed important enough to avoid. So, for example, even if an intermediary defines hate speech as that which tends to incite violence against targeted groups, how do we determine which speech has the propensity to do that? Much of this lies in identifying the factors relevant to making such causal predictions. In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming BU Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I don’t pretend that that we can make hard choices easy and recognize that intermediaries’ choices among various options may turn on a variety of issues: their assessment of the relative costs of hate speech and its constraint; empirical predictions about what sort of speech is indeed likely to lead to what sorts of harms; the breadth of their business interests, available resources, and the like; and their sense of corporate social responsibility to foster digital citizenship. Intermediaries’ choices on how to define hate speech and the harms that they seek to avoid — however difficult — can and should be made in a more principled and transparent way. Read the rest of this post »
January 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Technology, Web 2.0
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Can Suspicious Activity Reports Trigger Health Data Gathering?
posted by Frank Pasquale
In an article entitled “Monitoring America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin describe an extraordinary pattern of governmental surveillance. To be sure, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, there are important reasons to increase the government’s ability to understand threats to order. However, the persistence, replicability, and searchability of the databases now being compiled for intelligence purposes raise very difficult questions about the use and abuse of profiles, particularly in cases where health data informs the classification of individuals as threats.
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December 22, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Posted in: Criminal Procedure, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Health Law, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Medical), Social Network Websites, Technology, Uncategorized
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A Peace Treaty for the Google Wars?
posted by Frank Pasquale
As Google grows, so do fears about its possible overreach. A Wall Street Journal article quotes several companies worried that Google will use its dominance in search to invade their turf:
Google Inc. increasingly is promoting some of its own content over that of rival websites when users perform an online search, prompting competing sites to cry foul. The Internet giant is displaying links to its own services—such as local-business information or its Google Health service—above the links to other, non-Google content found by its search engine. . . .
TripAdvisor LLC Chief Executive Stephen Kaufer said the traffic his site gets from Google’s search engine dropped by more than 10%, on a seasonally adjusted basis, since mid-October—just before Google announced the latest change to the way its search engine shows information about local businesses. TripAdvisor.com, whose top source of traffic is Google, reviews hotels and other businesses frequented by travelers. . . .Google’s promotion of its own content over others’ has been one of many issues raised during the federal antitrust review of the company’s acquisition of ITA Software Inc., people involved in the discussions have said.
European antitrust authorities are also concerned. Jia Lynn Yang of the WaPo explains, “As the tech giant spreads its reach, it is making new enemies who fear that once Google steps onto their turf it will use its almighty search engine to quash them.” Anyone other than the top result may fear that Google has “hard coded bias” against them, in Ben Edelman’s memorable phrase.
This is a hard problem because a) Google’s ranking methods are secret, and b) Google’s results have been protected as speech by some courts. Therefore, even if a site wanted to sue Google on some kind of business tort theory, they might never get to discovery because the company could successfully characterize its rankings as a mere “opinion” of sites’ relevance.
But let’s just say that a disgruntled Google rival seeks not to change Google’s rankings, but to find out how they are generated. They are likely to run into the brick wall of trade secrecy—unless they can claim that the rankings violate some federal policy, like bans on stealth marketing. But even then, the challenger is going to run into real problems trying to understand exactly how Google ranks sites. What then?
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December 14, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines
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19 Points on Wikileaks
posted by Frank Pasquale
Don’t worry, it’s not another prolix post from me, just commentary on Jack Goldsmith’s Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks and Lovink & Riemens’s Twelve theses on WikiLeaks. (And here’s an FAQ for those confused by the whole controversy.)
Goldsmith, who takes cybersecurity very seriously, nevertheless finds himself “agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified.” He believes that “it is not obvious what law he has violated,” and Geoff Stone today said that many Lieberman-inspired efforts to expand the Espionage Act to include Assange’s conduct would be unconstitutional. Goldsmith asks:
What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why?
Lovink & Riemens provide something of an answer:
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December 11, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (National Security), Science Fiction, Wiki
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