Archive for the ‘Google & Search Engines’ Category
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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Rights and Responsibilities of Digital Citizenship
posted by Danielle Citron
In response to a previous post, Seth Finkelstein asked me to develop the implications of a conception of digital citizenship, and rightly so. This post begins by explaining which intermediaries Helen Norton and I address and then develops our conception of digital citizenship in a bit more detail. A follow-up post will provide preliminary suggestions about how intermediaries could, and should, educate users about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens.
As Jack Balkin highlights, the “informational filter, not information, is king” in our digital age. Internet intermediaries wield significant influence over our information landscape in much the same way that mass media does. Search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, determine “what we read” and “who gets heard” by producing links to content in response to user requests. Popular social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, structure online environments that enable large groups of individuals to connect with each other. While highlighting certain content and voices, Internet intermediaries downplay, block, and delete others. Christopher Yoo has extolled intermediaries’ exercise of editorial discretion as “promot[ing] important free speech values by helping shield audiences from unwanted speech and by helping them identify and access desired content.” As he observes, “the image of the Internet as an unintermediated experience, in which speakers speak directly to audiences without passing through any gatekeepers, is more myth than reality. The real question is not whether some actor, but rather which actor, will serve as the intermediary.”
Commentators have expressed concern about governmental efforts to enlist intermediaries as “proxy censors to control the flow of information.” In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming Boston University Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I focus exclusively on intermediaries’ purely voluntary decisions to address hate speech. As private entities, intermediaries can, and do, refuse to address cyber hate. Twitter has taken this position. Rather than taking a neutral position vis-a-vis online hatred, other intermediaries encourage it. Consider the social network site Hate Book whose motto is “Post something you hate!” and thousands of websites, blogs, social network sites, and the like designed to spread hate. Our conception of digital citizenship addresses intermediaries that choose to prohibit hateful content (and those might do so in the future) rather than intermediaries that ignore or support it. Pursuant to terms of service agreements and community guidelines, intermediaries remove, denounce, or ignore instances of cyber hate. Yet beyond vaguely-worded prohibitions of “hateful or offensive” speech, intermediaries often provide little explanation or consistency for their actions. They leave unstated and perhaps unexplored how their decisions regarding cyber hate impact citizens whose capability to participate meaningfully offline and online depends upon their inclusion in networked spaces. Intermediaries ought to teach users how to be responsible and respected digital citizens. Read the rest of this post »
November 28, 2010 at 10:53 am
Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Virtual Perils of Cyber Hate and the Need for a Conception of Digital Citizenship
posted by Danielle Citron
Although intermediaries’ services can facilitate and reinforce a citizenry’s activities, they pose dangers that work to undermine them. Consider the anonymous and pseudonymous nature of online discourse. Intermediaries permit individuals to create online identities unconnected to their legal identities. Freed from a sense of accountability for their online activities, citizens might engage in productive discourse in ways that they might not if directly correlated with their offline identities. Yet the sense of anonymity breeds destructive behavior as well. Social science research suggests that people behave aggressively when they believe that they cannot be observed and caught. Destructive online behavior spills offline, working a fundamental impairment of citizenship.
For instance, digital expressions of hatred helped inspire the 1999 shooting of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews in suburban Chicago by Benjamin Smith, a member of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) that promotes racial holy war. Just months before the shootings, Smith told documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson that: “It wasn’t really ‘til I got on the Internet, read some literature of these groups that . . . it really all came together.” More recently, the Facebook group Kick a Ginger Day urged members to get their “steel toes ready” for a day of attacking individuals with red hair. The site achieved its stated goal: students punched and kicked children with red hair and dozens of Facebook members claimed credit for attacks.
Cyber hate can produce so much psychological damage as to undermine individuals’ ability to engage in public discourse. For instance, posters on a white supremacist website targeted Bonnie Jouhari, a civil rights advocate and mother of a biracial girl. They revealed Ms. Jouhari’s home address and her child’s picture. The site showed a picture of Ms. Jouhari’s workplace exploding in flames next to the threat that “race traitors” are “hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post.” Posters included bomb-making instructions and a picture of a hooded Klansman holding a noose. Aside from moving four times, Ms. Jouhari and her daughter have withdrawn completely from public life; neither has a driver’s license, a voter registration card or a bank account because they don’t want to create a public record of their whereabouts.
Search engines also ensure the persistence and production of cyber hate that undermines citizens’ capability to engage in offline and online civic engagement. Because search engines reproduce information cached online, people cannot depend upon time’s passage to alleviate the damage that online postings cause. Unlike leaflets or signs affixed to trees that would decay or disappear not long after their publication, now search engines index all of the content hosted by social media intermediaries, producing it instantaneously. Read the rest of this post »
November 27, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Law and Inequality, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Psychology and Behavior, Race, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Facebook and Google: Twenty-First Century Institutions for Civic Engagement
posted by Danielle Citron
Democracy is often said to work best when citizens build networks of social interaction and trust. Civic engagement informs the inputs into the political process. So, too, it facilitates the formation of social capital, i.e., interpersonal connections and the norms of trust and reciprocity that arise from them. Social capital allows groups to overcome collective action problems so that they can “accomplish things together.” Moreover, civic engagement allows people to see their lives as entwined with others, to “feel [themselves] one of the public,” and “to weigh interests not [their] own.” In turn, citizens inculcate “habits of cooperation and public-spiritedness.” Civic engagement reinforced Alexis de Tocqueville’s “self-interest properly understood”—i.e., weighing interests other than one’s own—and encouraged “responsible citizenship.”
As Benjamin Barber explains, mediating institutions “give expression to the idea of citizenship.” This is especially so when institutions cultivate norms of trust across lines of social division (often referred to as “bridging ties”). In Amy Gutmann’s view, the “more economically, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous the membership of an association is, the greater its capacity to cultivate the kind of public discourse and deliberation that is conducive to democratic citizenship.” According to Neil Netanel, a liberal democratic polity needs citizens to encounter competing ideals so that they can test their commitments and gain empathy for those with whom they disagree.
Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the importance of townships and civic associations for citizens to acquire the skills and habits of dialogue. John Dewey found schools uniquely situated to teach children and adults about the social meaning of community. In his view, schools brought diverse people together in ways that “introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding.” For Cynthia Estlund, the workplace stood as the most important site for the formation of social and political views because it permits informal discourse among people “who are both connected with each other, so that they are inclined to listen, and different from each other, so that they are exposed to diverse ideas and experiences.” She also emphasized its atmosphere of enforced civility and equality, which allows diverse voices to be heard.
Online intermediaries constitute important twenty-first century mediating institutions. They extend workplaces, schoolhouses, and community centers to digital spaces. In this way, they supplement real-space exchanges of information and opinion with virtual ones. Companies encourage employees to use social network sites to deepen workplace relationships. Workers, in turn, discuss issues in person and in online postings. Student organizations meet face-to-face in classrooms and in social network groups. Neighborhood communities combine offline activities with online ones. Google’s Blogger hosts blogs designed to facilitate commentary on community events. In these and other infinitely different ways, users of online intermediaries perform their roles as citizens.
Worth recognizing are the potential democratic goods facilitated by intermediaries. Online intermediaries continue discussions among diverse groups of workers and students who are inclined to listen to each other. Because social media brings the personal lives of individuals to the fore, it has the capacity to deepen empathy for different backgrounds. Of virtual communications amongst workers, Cynthia Estlund notes: Because the workplace would provide face-to-face interactions, “electronic communications can expand and equalize work relationships.” Social science research shows that social network sites support loose social ties that allow users to maintain networks of relationships. A 2007 study found that Facebook does indeed cultivate bridging social capital. Because intermediaries enable groups to combine real-space activities with virtual ones, they impact civic engagement through their architecture and content choices. Read the rest of this post »
November 26, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Users of Online Intermediaries as Citizens
posted by Danielle Citron
Most naturally, social media providers and search engines see their users as consumers. As commercial enterprises, they aim to reap profits, which users help secure with advertising and information revenue. Yet they should also view their users as citizens. Because intermediaries are designed to enable public discourse, they facilitate the formation of a citizenry.
Citizenship is not simply a matter of legal status enjoyed by members of a body politic, though it serves that crucial role. It refers to one’s engagement in public life as well. Public participation is often viewed as essential for members of a democracy to form a citizenry. As John Dewey wrote, citizenship extends beyond the legal dimension to include “all of the relationships . . . involved in membership in a community.” For John Stuart Mill, citizens are individuals who develop their faculties through active engagement in public life. In this sense, citizenship “provides what other roles cannot, namely an integrative experience which brings together the multiple role activities of the contemporary person and demands that the separate roles be surveyed from a more general point of view.”
Online intermediaries provide essential tools for citizenship. Individuals rooted in our national polity connect, debate, and pursue common interests on intermediaries’ platforms. Seeing users as citizens is important for intermediaries interested in understanding what is at stake when they host and index cyber hate. This leads to the question of how intermediaries impact citizenry in the Information Age, to which I will turn in my next post.
November 26, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Legal Ethics, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology
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Privacy and Youth
posted by Daniel Solove
A new poll by Common Sense Media reveals some interesting data about privacy and youth. The poll was conducted by Zogby International:
* 75% of parents “say that social networks aren’t doing a good job of protecting kids’ online privacy.”
* 92% of parents “are concerned that kids share too much information online.”
* 85% of parents are “more concerned about online privacy than they were five years ago.”
In addition to parents, the poll surveyed teens and found:
* 85% of teens “say that online search engines and social networking services should be required to get permission before using personal information to market products to them.”
* 81% of teens “say that search engines and online social networking sites should not be able to share their physical location with other companies before they have given specific authorization.”
* 79% of teens “think their friends share too much personal information online.”
These findings cast further doubt on the oft-heard statement that youth just don’t care about privacy. Earlier, I blogged about a study by by Chris Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow that showed that the attitudes about privacy of youths and adults didn’t diverge by much.
October 8, 2010 at 10:29 am
Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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Cato Debate on Surveillance
posted by Frank Pasquale
Today brings news that the “Electronic Privacy Information Center [has] filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for documents related to any agreement between Google and the NSA” on cybersecurity and related matters. The controversy over the request reminds me of an excellent recent debate on the digital surveillance state at Cato Unbound. Glenn Greenwald leads off by documenting an array of intrusive surveillance practices:
[T]he Bush administration . . . ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. . . .
[Medical] “files” are maintained through a 2005 law which, the Government claims, authorizes it to monitor and record all prescription drug use by all citizens via so-called “Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs.” And there is a slew of other under-discussed surveillance programs whereby the U.S. government stores vast data on our private activities: everything from every domestic telephone call we make to “risk assessment” records based on our travel activities. A bipartisan group of Senators is currently promoting mandated “biometric ID cards” for every American as a purported solution to illegal immigration.
Paul Rosenzweig responds that there are several programs internal to federal agencies designed to protect privacy, including DHS’s “statutorily required Privacy Officer” and “Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.” Julian Sanchez insists that, regardless of these formal protections, the overall architecture of communications and data storage has enabled a quantum leap in surveillance:
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September 14, 2010 at 8:33 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security), Technology, Uncategorized
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Online Symposium: Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet–And How To Stop It
posted by Danielle Citron
It’s an honor to introduce Jonathan Zittrain and the participants in our online symposium on The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. From tomorrow through Wednesday, we will be discussing Zittrain’s important book, which warns of a shift in the Internet’s trajectory from a wide-open Web of creative anarchy to a series of closed platforms that will curtail innovation. As Zittrain predicted, “tethered appliances” dominate our information ecosystem today. We increasingly trade generative technologies like PCs that permit experimentation for sterile, reliable appliances like mobile phones, video game consoles, and book readers that limit or forbid tinkering. Zittrain attributes this phenomenon to the unfortunate, yet now predictable, pathologies that generativity enables. Although generative technologies facilitate innovation, they permit the spread of spam, viruses, malware, and the like.
According to Zittrain, the Internet is at a crucial inflection point. Rather than sustaining the wide-open Web of creativity and disruption, the Internet may in time become a series of controlled networks that limit innovation and enable inappropriate governmental and corporate surveillance. Zittrain offers various strategies to forestall such scenarios, including tools to empower users to solve problems that drive users to sterile appliances and networks. Zittrain argues that our information ecology functions best with generative technology at its core.
The Future of the Internet raises a host of fascinating and timely questions. Is the future of the Internet indeed bleak? As this month’s cover story for Wired asks: is Zittrain’s dark future only likely in the “commercial content side” of the digital economy? Might a healthy balance of generative technologies and tethered appliances emerge, or is the move to appliancized networks a grab for control that will be difficult to shake? Will non-generative technologies impact our democratic commitments and cultural values? Should we remain committed to protecting generativity? Are there alternative strategies for preserving innovation besides the ones that Zittrain offers?
To consider these and other issues, we have invited an all-star cast of thinkers:
My co-bloggers will join this conversation as well. In a post in April 2009, co-blogger Deven Desai started our conversation about The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. Since that time, the wild-fire adoption of tethered appliances, iPod applications, iTunes, and the like have shown just how prophetic and important Zittrain’s book is. We are excited for the discussion to begin.
September 6, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Anonymity, Architecture, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki
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Rethinking Net Neutrality after the Verizon/Google Framework
posted by Frank Pasquale
There has been a lot of insightful commentary on the new Verizon/Google framework proposal; Marvin Ammori’s post is a good place to start. Here are my “two cents” on the larger implications of this move from business cooperation to lobbying alliance.
1) The companies’ CEOs have stated that, in their view, “A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service complying with [basic net neutrality] principles” should be able to “offer any other additional or differentiated services” free of net neutrality regulation. The key question here is the quality and cost of the “broadband Internet access service complying with [net neutrality] principles,” as compared with the “additional services” that can be offered without net neutrality. In the best case scenario, most people use the compliant service for most traffic, and run “additional services” on top of it in order to access special content/apps. Unfortunately, I think it’s far more likely that the net-neutrality-compliant service will gradually decline in quality, so that it’s vestigial (like public broadcasting) or a poor program for poor people (ala Medicaid).
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August 10, 2010 at 11:21 am
Posted in: Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Intellectual Property, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Technology
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WSJ Animated Graphic on Google’s Quest to Know Everything
posted by Daniel Solove
WSJ animated graphic on Google’s quest to know everything (DJS)
August 10, 2010 at 1:28 am
Posted in: Asides, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy)
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Mechanical Turk, Research Ethics, and Research Assistants
posted by Glenn Cohen
A recent faculty workshop by my witty and brilliant colleague Jonathan Zittrain on “ubiquitous human computing,” (this youtube video captures in a different form what he was talking about ), prompted me to thinking about some ways in which platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, interface with university research and research ethics in interesting ways.
For those unfamiliar, Mechanical Turk allows you to farm out a variety of small tasks (label this image, enter date of this .pdf to a spreadsheet, take a photo of yourself with the sign “will turk for food,” etc) at a price per unit you set. Millions of anonymous users can then do the task for you and collect the bounty, a form of microwork.
As Jonathan detailed, this raises a host of fascinating issues, but I want to focus on two that are closer to bioethics.
First, I have begun to see some legal academics recruiting populations for experimental work using Mechanical Turk, and there is an emerging literature on the pros and cons of subject recruitment from these populations. Are Mechanical Turkers “research subjects” within the legal (primarily the Common Rule if one receives federal funding) or broader ethical sense of the term? Should they be? Take as a tangible example the implicit bias research of the kind Mahzarin R. Banarji has made famous, and imagine it was done over something like Mechanical Turk. How (if at all) should the anonymity of the subject, the lack of subject-experimenter relationship of any sort, the piecemeal nature of the task, etc, change the way an institutional review board reviews the research? It is a mantra in the research ethics community that informed consent is supposed to be a “process” not a document, but how can that process take place in this anonymous static cyberspace environment?
Second, consider research assistance.
August 3, 2010 at 9:49 am
Posted in: Amazon, Anonymity, Bioethics, Bright Ideas, Google & Search Engines, Law and Psychology, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Technology, Web 2.0
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More on the New Neutralities
posted by Frank Pasquale
As more bottlenecks emerge online, we’re going to hear about “new neutralities” beyond net neutrality. For a state of the art discussion of the issue, check out Mark Patterson’s article in the Fordham L. Rev. (“Non-Network Barriers to Network Neutrality”):
Even though search engines are presumably outside the jurisdiction of the FCC, if we do indeed have a national Internet policy that makes it impermissible to “significantly impede[] consumers’ ability to access the content and use the applications of their choice,” it is hard to see why both requirements of neutrality and disclosures of non-neutrality would not apply just as strongly, and perhaps even more strongly, to search engines as to access providers. . . .
July 23, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Privacy
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FT Series on “The Google Economy”
posted by Frank Pasquale
Richard Waters has a very interesting series in the Financial Times on new legal concerns about Google’s power. (Full disclosure: I’m quoted in the net neutrality piece.) Articles include:
Series Overview: The Google Economy.
1. Net Neutrality Comes Back to Haunt Google
2. Unrest Over Google’s Secret Formula
3. Services Attract Complaints of Favoritism
A few choice quotes below the fold:
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July 13, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines
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The Decline of Media Studies (and Privacy) in a Search Engine Society
posted by Frank Pasquale
I often hear statements like “I’m the top Google result for my name!” or “Kiwi is the top search result for shoe polish!” Truth is, there’s no such thing. You can know the top results that you see, and you can survey what others see, but only the search engine knows what everybody is seeing in response to a query. Evgeny Morozov worries about this trend:
There is a danger that we will become even less well-informed, as the web becomes both more personalised and more social. Concerns that the internet traps users in unchallenging information ghettos are not new, stretching back to 2001 and the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com. Sunstein argues that, when compared to older media, the internet allows users to seek out opinions and news with which they already agree, creating online news ghettos in which the views of right and left rarely mix.
What is surprising, however, is that today’s technology companies seem to use that book as a to-do-list. Google, for example, has been pushing to provide personalised search results to its users, meaning that two people searching for the same term may now get different results, altered according to what they have clicked on before. In December 2009, Google tweaked its rules in such a way that even users who are not signed into Google—thus denying the search giant access to their previous search history—will see their results personalised too. Facebook is not far behind.
Admittedly, these developments are helpful to individuals—how could anyone use Facebook without hiding Farmville? But they counsel extreme epistemological modesty for anyone who would write about the effects of search engines on the public sphere. Alex Halavais notes in his book Search Engine Society that, “[i]n the process of ranking results, search engines effectively create winners and losers on the web as a whole.” But we have little idea who exactly those winners and losers are at the level of granularity that search engines can operate at.
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July 10, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Privacy (National Security), Social Network Websites, Technology
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RFID Tags for Nurses, then Everybody?
posted by Frank Pasquale
As an opinion piece by Theresa Brown explains, maintaining proper staffing levels in hospitals is becoming increasingly difficult. Surveillance systems are offering one way to address the problem; work can be performed more intensively and efficiently as it is recorded and studied. But such monitoring has many troubling implications, according to Torin Monahan (in his excellent book, Surveillance in a Time of Insecurity):
The tracking of people [via Radio Frequency Identification Tags] represents a . . . mechanism of surveillance and social control in hospital settings. This includes the tagging of patients and hospital staff. . . . When administrators demand the tagging of nurses themselves, the level of surveillance can become oppressive. . . . [because nurses face] labor intensification, job insecurity, undesired scrutiny, and privacy loss. . . . To date, such efforts at top-down micromanagement of staff by means of RFID have met with resistance. . . . One desired feature for nurses and others is an ‘off’ switch on each RFID badge so that they can take breaks without subjecting themselves to remote tracking. (122)
Like the “nannycam” employed by many a wary parent, the nurse-cam may be seen as a way to protect vulnerable patients (and perhaps increase the accuracy of evidence in malpractice cases). On the other hand, inserting a watchful electronic eye to monitor what is already an extremely stressful job may create many unintended consequences, or deter people from going into nursing altogether. Even advocates of pervasive surveillance recognize these difficulties.
The increasing pressure to monitor what happens inside hospitals reminds me of a recent article by Thomas Goetz in Wired (no link yet) on Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s quest to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease. As Goetz describes it, a new form of “high-speed science” depends on rapid accumulation of as much data as possible:
In Brin’s way of thinking, each of our lives is a potential contribution to scientific insight. We all go about our days, making choices, eating things, taking medications, doing things—generating what is inelegantly called data exhaust. . . . With contemporary computing power, that data can be tracked and analyzed. “Any experience that we have or drug that we may take, all those things are individual pieces of information. Individually, they’re worthless, they’re anecdotal. But taken together they can be very powerful.” In computer science, the process of mining such large data sets for useful associations is known as a market-basket analysis.
Goetz has promoted this as a new way to “do science in the petabyte age.”
I had a few responses to these ideas.
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June 22, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw, Economic Analysis of Law, Google & Search Engines, Health Law, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Medical), Technology
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