Archive for the ‘Social Network Websites’ Category

Stanford Law Review Online: The Privacy Paradox 2012 Symposium Issue

posted by Stanford Law Review

Our 2012 Symposium Issue, The Privacy Paradox: Privacy and Its Conflicting Values, is now available online:

Essays

• A Reasonableness Approach to Searches After the Jones GPS Tracking Case by Peter Swire (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 57);
• Privacy in the Age of Big Data by Omer Tene & Jules Polonetsky (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 63);
• Yes We Can (Profile You): A Brief Primer on Campaigns and Political Data by Daniel Kreiss (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 70);
• Paving the Regulatory Road to the “Learning Health Care System” by Deven McGraw (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 75);
• Famous for Fifteen People: Celebrity, Newsworthiness, and Fraley v. Facebook by Simon J. Frankel, Laura Brookover & Stephen Satterfield (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 82); and
• The Right to Be Forgotten by Jeffrey Rosen (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 88).

The text of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski’s keynote is forthcoming.

  February 13, 2012 at 1:04 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Stanford), Law Rev Contents, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Media Law, Military Law, Politics, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security), Social Network Websites, Supreme Court, Technology, Tort Law   Print This Post   No Comments

Tempest in Tempe: First Amendment in the Desert

posted by Derek Bambauer

In the spirit of the excellent colloquy here about Marvin’s thinking on First Amendment architectures, I bring up this news item: Arizona State University blocked both Web access to, and e-mail from, the change.org Web site. ASU students had begun a petition demanding that the university reduce tuition. The university essentially made three claims as to why it did so (below, in order of increasing stupidity):

1. It was a technical mistake;
2. Change.org was spamming ASU; and
3. ASU needs to “protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research and administrative uses.”

#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, and sign it, you do need to block access to the Web site.

For #2, sorry, ASU, this isn’t spam. Spam is unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail. Change.org is, allegedly, sending unsolicited political e-mail. And that’s protected by the First Amendment – see, for example, the Virginia Supreme Court’s analysis of that state’s anti-spam law that covered political messages. Potential political spammers have a sharp disincentive to fill recipient’s inboxes – it’s a sure-fire way to annoy them into opposing your position.

For #3, ASU doesn’t get to determine what academic and research uses are “legitimate.” If they throttle P2P apps, that’s fine. If they limit file sizes for attachments, no problem. But deciding that the message from Change.org is not “legitimate” is classic, and unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination.

This looks like censorship. I think it’s more likely to be stupidity: someone in ASU’s IT department decided to block these messages as spam, and to filter outbound Web requests to the site contained within those messages. But: with great power over the network comes great responsibility. Well-intentioned constitutional violations are still unlawful. It would also help if ASU’s spokesperson simply admitted the mistake rather than engaging in idiotic justification.

As I mention in Orwell’s Armchair, public actors are increasingly important sources of Internet access. But when ASU and other public universities take on the role of ISP, they need to remember that they are not AOL: their technical decisions are constrained not merely by tech resources, but by our commitment to free speech. Let’s hope the Sun Devils cool off on the filtering…

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  February 10, 2012 at 5:10 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Symposium Next Week on “A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents”

posted by Frank Pasquale

On February 14-16, we will host an online symposium on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, by Samir Chopra and Laurence White. Given the great discussions at our previous symposiums for Tim Wu’s Master Switch  and Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet, I’m sure this one will be a treat.  Participants will include Ken Anderson, Ryan Calo, James Grimmelmann, Sonia Katyal, Ian Kerr, Andrea Matwyshyn, Deborah DeMott, Paul Ohm,  Ugo Pagallo, Lawrence Solum, Ramesh Subramanian and Harry Surden.  Chopra will be reading their posts and responding here, too.  I discussed the book with Chopra and Grimmelmann in Brooklyn a few months ago, and I believe the audience found fascinating the many present and future scenarios raised in it.  (If you’re interested in Google’s autonomous cars, drones, robots, or even the annoying little Microsoft paperclip guy, you’ll find something intriguing in the book.)

There is an introduction to the book below the fold.  (Chapter 2 of the book was published in the Illinois Journal of Law, Technology and Policy, and can be found online at SSRN).  We look forward to hosting the discussion!

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  February 8, 2012 at 10:43 am   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Criminal Law, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Social Network Websites, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents), Technology, Tort Law   Print This Post   10 Comments

The E.U. Data Protection Directive and Robot Chicken

posted by Derek Bambauer

The European Commission released a draft of its revised Data Protection Directive this morning, and Jane Yakowitz has a trenchant critique up at Forbes.com. In addition to the sharp legal analysis, her article has both a Star Wars and Robot Chicken reference, which makes it basically the perfect information law piece…

  January 25, 2012 at 4:32 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Civil Rights, Consumer Protection Law, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Politics, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act Protest Day

posted by Danielle Citron

As my co-blogger Gerard notes, today is SOPA protest day.  Sites like Google or WordPress have censored their logo or offered up a away to contact your congressperson, though remain live.  Other sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Craigslist have shutdown, and more are set to shut down at some point today.  There’s lots of terrific commentary on SOPA, which is designed to tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music, and other products–but with a heavy hand that threatens free expression and due process. The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz has this story and Politico has another helpful piece; The Hill’s Brendan Sasso’s Twitter feed has lots of terrific updates.  Mark Lemley, David Levine, and David Post carefully explain why we ought to reject SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act in “Don’t Break the Internet” published by Stanford Law Review Online.  In the face of the protest, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) vowed to bring SOPA to a vote in his committee next month. “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property,” he said.  So, too, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pushed back against websites planning to shut down today in protest of his bill.  “Much of what has been claimed about the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions. The PROTECT IP Act will not affect Wikipedia, will not affect reddit, and will not affect any website that has any legitimate use,” Chairman Leahy said. Everyone’s abuzz on the issue, and rightly so.  I spoke at a panel on intermediary liability at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net conference and everyone wanted to talk about SOPA.  I’m hoping that the black out and other shows of disapproval will convince our representatives in the House and Senate to back off the most troubling parts of the bill.  As fabulous guest blogger Derek Bambauer argues, we need to bring greater care and thought to the issue of Internet censorship.  Cybersecurity is at issue too, and we need to pay attention.  Derek may be right that both bills may go nowhere, especially given Silicon Valley’s concerted lobbying efforts against the bills.  But we will have to watch to see if Representative Smith lives up to his promise to bring SOPA back to committee and if Senator Leahy remains as committed to PROTECT IP Act in a few weeks as he is today.

  January 18, 2012 at 10:11 am   Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Law Talk, Media Law, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

Surveillance, For Your Benefit?

posted by Danielle Citron

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on retailers’ use of camera surveillance to glean intelligence from shoppers’ behavior.  A company called RetailNext, for instance, runs its software through a store’s security camera video feed to analyze customer behavior.  It describes itself as the “leader in real-time in-store monitoring, enabling retailers and manufacturers to collect, analyze and visualize in-store data.”  According to the company, it “uses best-in-class video analytics, on-shelf sensors, along with data from point-of-sale and other business systems, to automatically inform retailers about how people engage in their stores.”  RetailNext’s software can integrate data from hardware such as RFID chips and motion sensors to track customers’ movements.  The company explains that it “tracks more than 20 million shoppers per month by collecting data from more than 15,000 sensors in retail stores.”  Its service apparently helps stores figure out where to place certain merchandise to boost sales.  T-Mobile uses similar technology from another firm 3VR, whose software tracks how people move around their stores, how long they stand in front of displays, and which phones they pick up and for how long.  3VR is testing facial-recognition software that can identify shoppers’ gender and approximate age.   Businessweek explains that the “software would give retailers a better handle on customer demographics and help them tailor promotions.”  What we are seeing is, according to 3VR’s CEO, just “scratching the surface as someday “you’ll have the ability to measure every metric imaginable.”

Indeed.  Little imagination is needed to predict the future in light of our present.  As Joseph Turow‘s important new book The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Worth (Yale University Press) explores, data collection and analysis of individuals is breathtaking.  In the name of better, more relevant advertising and marketing efforts, companies like Acxiom have databases teeming with our demographic data (age, gender, race, ethnicity, address, income, marital status), interests, online and offline spending habits, and heath status based on our purchases and online comments (diabetic, allergy sufferer, and the like).  Consumers are sorted into categories such as “Corporate Clout,” “Soccer and SUV,” “Mortgage Woes,” and “On the Edge.”  eXelate gathers online data of over 200 million unique individuals per month through deals with hundreds of sites: their demographics, social activities, and social networks.  Advertisers can add even more data to eXelate’s cookies– data from Nielsen, which includes Census Bureau data, as well as data brokers’ digital dossiers.  Data firms like Lotame track the comments that people leave on sites and categorize them.  Now, let’s consider weaving in facial recognition software and retailer cameras of companies like 3VR and RetailNext.  And to really top things off, let’s think about linking all of this data to cellphone location information.  The surveillance of networked spaces would be totalizing.

Turow’s book exposes important costs of these developments.  This post will discuss a few–hopefully, I can have Professor Turow on for a Bright Ideas feature.  This sort of targeting and hyper surveillance leaves many with far more narrow options and with social discrimination.  Marketers use these databases to determine if Americans are worthy “targets” or not-worth-bothering with “waste.”  For the “Soccer and SUV” moms between 35 and 45 who live in the West Coast and want to buy a small car, car companies may offer them serious discounts via online advertisements and e-mail.  But their “On the Edge” counterparts get left in the cold with higher prices–why bother trying to attract people who don’t pay their debts?  All of this sorting encourages media to offer soft stories designed to meet people’s interests, as secretly determined by those gathering and analyzing our networked lives.  This discussion brings to mind to another important read: Julie Cohen‘s Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press).   As Professor Cohen thoughtfully explores, this sort of surveillance has a profound impact on the creative play of our everyday lives.  It creates hierarchies among those watched and systematizes difference.  I’ll have lots more to say about Cohen’s take on our networked society more generally, soon.  In March, we will be hosting an online symposium on her book–much to look forward to in the new year.

  December 25, 2011 at 4:15 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Medical), Social Network Websites, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Gamifying Control of the Scored Self

posted by Frank Pasquale

Social sorting is big business. Bosses and bankers crave “predictive analytics:” ways of deciding who will be the best worker, borrower, or customer. Our economy is less likely to reward someone who “builds a better mousetrap” than it is to fund a startup which will identify those most likely to buy a mousetrap. The critical resource here is data, the fossil fuel of the digital economy. Privacy advocates are digital environmentalists, worried that rapid exploitation of data either violates moral principles or sets in motion destructive processes we only vaguely understand now.*

Start-up fever fuels these concerns as new services debut and others grow in importance. For example, a leader at Lenddo, “the first credit scoring service that uses your online social network to assess credit,” has called for “thousands of engineers [to work] to assess creditworthiness.” We all know how well the “quants” have run Wall Street—but maybe this time will be different. His company aims to mine data derived from digital monitoring of relationships. ITWorld headlined the development: “How Facebook Can Hurt Your Credit Rating”–”It’s time to ditch those deadbeat friends.” It also brought up the disturbing prospect of redlined portions of the “social graph.”

There’s a lot of value in such “news you can use” reporting. However, I think it misses some problematic aspects of a pervasively evaluated and scored digital world. Big data’s fans will always counter that, for every person hurt by surveillance, there’s someone else who is helped by it. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, whether the game of reputation-building is truly zero-sum, and the far more important question of whether these judgments are fair. The data-meisters’ analytics deserve scrutiny on other grounds.
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  December 19, 2011 at 3:21 pm   Posted in: Political Economy, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Sociology of Law   Print This Post   One Comment

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   Print This Post   One Comment

Should Teachers Be Banned from Communicating with Students Online?

posted by Daniel Solove

Increasingly, states and school districts are struggling over how to deal with teachers who communicate with students online via social network websites.  One foolish way to address the issue is via strict bans, such as a law passed in Missouri earlier this year that attempted to ban teachers from friending students on social network websites.  Such laws are likely violations of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and association, and I blogged at the Huffington Post that the law was unconstitutional.  Soon thereafter, a court quickly struck down the law.

The NY Times now has an article out about the challenges in crafting social media policies for teacher-student interaction, noting that “stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students.”

There are a number of considerations that schools should think about when crafting a social media policy:

1. The policy should account for the fact that there are legitimate reasons for students and teachers to communicate online.  A teacher might be related to a student, and certainly a law or policy shouldn’t ban parents from friending their children.  Or a teacher might be a godparent to a child or a close family friend or related in some way.

2. One middle-ground approach is to require parental consent whenever a teacher wants to friend a minor student online.  This greater transparency will address the cases where teachers might have inappropriate communication with minors.

3. Clear guidelines about appropriate teacher expression should be set forth, so teachers know what things will be inappropriate to say.  Teachers need to learn about their legal obligations of confidentiality, as well as avoiding invasions of privacy, defamation, harassment, threats, and other problematic forms of speech.

4. When teachers use social network sites in the classroom — or otherwise use blogs and online posting as a teaching device — they should exercise great care, especially when requiring minors to express themselves publicly online.  I’ve seen some class blogs, where students are asked to post reactions to reading or write online journals.  Making students post their views and opinions to the public, especially at such a young age, strikes me as a problematic practice.  The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) would protect minors under the age of 13, but teachers should be sensitive to minors 13 and older too.  No minor student should be required to post any personal information or class assignment on a publicly-accessible website without the student’s consent and the parent’s consent.  And all websites that involve student personal information have a privacy policy.

5. Education is key.  I’ve read about a lot of cases involving improper social media use by educators, and they often stem from a lack of awareness.  Teachers think they can say nearly anything and it will be protected by the First Amendment.  The First Amendment law actually gives schools a lot of leeway in disciplining educators for what they say, and educators can also be sued by those whom they write about.  Educators often think that if they post something anonymously, then it is okay or they can get away with it — but anonymity online is often a mirage, and comments can readily be traced back to the speaker.  And educators often set the privacy settings on social media sites incorrectly.  They don’t spend enough time learning the ins and outs of the privacy settings.  These are actually quite tricky — even rocket scientists have trouble figuring them out.

  December 17, 2011 at 9:40 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites   Print This Post   3 Comments

Facebook Settles with the FTC

posted by Daniel Solove

Facebook has settled with the FTC over its change to its privacy policies back in 2009. According to the FTC complaint, as summed up by the FTC press release, Facebook engaged in a number of unfair and deceptive trade practices:

• In December 2009, Facebook changed its website so certain information that users may have designated as private – such as their Friends List – was made public. They didn’t warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance.
• Facebook represented that third-party apps that users’ installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users’ personal data – data the apps didn’t need.
• Facebook told users they could restrict sharing of data to limited audiences – for example with “Friends Only.” In fact, selecting “Friends Only” did not prevent their information from being shared with third-party applications their friends used.
• Facebook had a “Verified Apps” program & claimed it certified the security of participating apps. It didn’t.
• Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did.
• Facebook claimed that when users deactivated or deleted their accounts, their photos and videos would be inaccessible. But Facebook allowed access to the content, even after users had deactivated or deleted their accounts.
• Facebook claimed that it complied with the U.S.- EU Safe Harbor Framework that governs data transfer between the U.S. and the European Union. It didn’t.

 

The settlement, which requires auditing of Facebook for 20 years, makes a number of requirements.  Facebook will be:

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  November 29, 2011 at 4:53 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites   Print This Post   No Comments

Facebook, Bullet Not Dodged Yet (Part Deux)

posted by Danielle Citron

In June, I blogged about the dreaded question (for parents of teenagers): “Mom, can I have a Facebook profile?”  At the time, we talked about its benefits and drawbacks.  On the one hand, it’s a gateway to socializing that she had been missing given her late birthday.  Different sports leagues had Facebook groups, perhaps she needed to join, and other activities would as well.  On the other hand, her privacy and reputation could be jeopardized, by her own hand or her “friends.”  Facebook’s privacy settings are notoriously whimsical, and more importantly as Steve Bellovin’s work shows notoriously misunderstood–setting up an account was indeed a game of chance, or as Bob Keller notes, like giving your kid a pipe of crystal meth.  We gave our thirteen year old kid the choice and told her to talk to us when she was ready to get started.  The summer came and went and all was quiet.  So now, a good five months later and a good five months wiser, my kid has decided that she wants to think about getting a Facebook page again.  And the conversation went something like this (she did all of the talking):  So I’m feeling excited about this.  Facebook would let me stay in touch with my sleep-away camp friends who live all over the place and I could friend kids that I meet from other schools in the area, at games, mixers, etc.  And I am jazzed about this new close friends feature that everyone’s been talking about.  This way I can share photographs only with my five best pals and I don’t have to worry.  (Pause).  But, I really want to friend the kids from camp and want them to see what I am up to, so this close friends feature may not work.  And what if those camp friends have weird friends or end up being strange themselves.  I can’t de-friend them, can I and still pal around at camp?  And I don’t want other people making judgments about me based on what those not-so-close friends are up to?  Will colleges see what I am doing, when it comes time?  And what if someone goes on my close friend’s computer and copy and pastes my silly remarks and it goes viral, like the Friday girl who ended up getting death threats and harassed.  Can I put up my favorite artists?  I definitely can say I like the Beatles and Elton John, but can I say Kesha?  Will people think I am appropriate if I put Kesha down or Katy Perry?  Some of their songs are, err, a little inappropriate.

After all of that, my kid said she needed to think about it, it all seemed so, well, complicated.  That seemed just the right word: complicated.  But the question seems even more tricky now than it did in June.  Who is she doing this for?  Taking cues from Erving Goffman, life is a performance.  Some of it is just for you–a way to develop oneself, experiment, play, and figure out who you are as much as who you are not.  Much of it is for others.  We perform different roles for the people in our lives: friends, parents, co-workers, coach, priest/imam/rabbi, acquaintances, and strangers.  Some performances are oppressive: we cover or pass as best we can in the face of stigma and prejudice.  And we perform at a time of extensive social and political surveillance.  We feel watched, and for good reason.  Companies give us social influence scores.  Employers, marketers, and businesses use those scores to benefit some, leaving others less favored and less fortunate.  Maybe we perform online for them?  Colleges look at social media profiles.  (danah boyd has a great piece about a question a college asked her about a student’s MySpace page, which seemingly contradicted his college essay.)  Do young people perform for them?  At the same time, government monitors our online presence, searching for threats to critical infrastructure and the like.  Government 2.0 social media sites may be keeping track of the stories we like, the friends we make, and pictures we post.  Who knows?  Agencies aren’t promising not to watch us, so maybe being careful is smart.  Are we performing for fusion centers and our government social media friends?  All of this watching brings to mind Julie Cohen’s book Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2011, see her talk here)–more on that in early 2012 in our online symposium on the book.  Navigating those questions every time one posts on Facebook is bewildering, especially because we can’t really control what happens to the information posted there.  A commentator on my previous post basically said that I had better get a grip on reality, that nothing I did or said could influence what she did and she would hate me anyway.  I guess we just fundamentally disagree.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and lots of what my kid is mulling comes from long, long conversations we have had about being a responsible and smart digital citizen.  I am looking forward to talking it through again, once she has a better idea of what she wants to do.

P.S. Sorry about the light blogging, working on my first book on cyber mobs and hate (forthcoming Harvard University Press).

H/T Susan McCarty (who helped me find the db piece) , JJC

  October 6, 2011 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Culture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0, Weird   Print This Post   5 Comments

Hot Summer Flashes, Black Urban Mobs

posted by Olivier Sylvain

  September 5, 2011 at 11:52 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, First Amendment, Media Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Race, Social Network Websites, Sociology of Law, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   8 Comments

Identifying Those Responsible for a “Living Horror” and Its Signficance for Proposed Federal Law

posted by Danielle Citron

In what can only be described as the worst side of humanity, the bulletin board Dreamboard hosted a members-only sharing of child pornography, particularly of children under 12.  New members could join the board only if they posted child pornography.  Members had to continue to post images of child porn every 50 days or face removal.  The rules of the board, printed in English, Russian, Japanese, and Spanish, included: (1) “Keep the girls under 13, in fact, I really need to see 12 or younger to know your[sic] a brother,” (2) “don’t avoid nudity in previews. I will NOT accept you if there’s no nudity.  And my definition of nudity is pussy or anal in the shot.  You just waste your own time if you don’t do this.  Because you will not get in, if you don’t follow the rules.”  One section of Dreamboard was titled “Super Hardcore,” and the rules required images and videos of “very young kids, getting fucked, and preteens in distress, and or crying. . . . If a girl looks totally comfortable, she’s not in distress, and it does NOT belong in this section.”  This part of the site featured images of adults having violent sexual intercourse with very young children, including infants.  One file was entitled “2yo assfuck she cries for mommy nasty pthc pedo 1 yo 3 yo 4 yo.”  The board amassed over 120 terabytes of violent sexual rape and abuse of children.

According to the rules of the site, members were to use encryption technologies to prevent detection.  The rules specified precisely which encryption technologies and proxy servers should be used and which should be avoided.  Members did not use their real names, but instead screen names to conceal their identities.  All of this suggests that the board went to great lengths to secure their anonymity.

Early this month, Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. announced that federal investigators has charged 72 people for violating child pornography laws and more than 50 people have been arrested in the United States.  The defendants included doctors, lawyers, police officers, and a Navy commander, according to the Ellis County Observer.  Thirteen of those charged have pled guilty, and four members have been sentenced between 20 and 30 years.  Around 600 people from around the world were members of the bulletin board, which has been shut down.  The bulletin board used a server in Atlanta.  As Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer explained, the site “was a living horror.”  John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to say how investigators overcame the technological precautions used by some of the members.  He did tell the New York Times: “To those inclined to abuse small children, know this: this isn’t a place on the Internet or the planet in which you are truly safe.  It may take us some time, it may take us some effort, but we will find you regardless of a screen name, a proxy server or an encryption effort, period.” Read the rest of this post »

  August 18, 2011 at 11:48 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Cyber Civil Rights, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Social Network Websites   Print This Post   7 Comments

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   Print This Post   One Comment

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   Print This Post   No Comments

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:
Read the rest of this post »

  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   Print This Post   No Comments

Facebook as Hitbook, Sigh

posted by Danielle Citron

Facebook and other social network sites offer much to celebrate.  They have given new life to long-standing relationships and cemented new ones while providing innovative means to share ideas and engage with different communities.  Offline relationships are extended online.  Student groups meet in classrooms as well as on YouTube channels.  Employees talk in the office and online (sometimes even to critique their bosses with co-workers, see Kashmir Hill‘s always- thought-provoking commentary).

Naturally, with all of this socializing comes the far darker side of human relationships.  Social network sites sponsor threats, harassment, and hatred, leading to important, though always outmatched, voluntary efforts to address destructive behaviors.  Given the scale of these sites, the Chief Safety Officers of those social network sites need help identifying malicious activity that their Terms of Service prohibit.  This summer, Facebook and the police learned about another disturbing case: a Chester County man tried to use Facebook to hire a hit man to kill a woman who accused him of rape.  In July, the woman called the police after seeing a posting on the man’s Facebook page that offered $500 for “a girls head.”  The man later updated the posting, saying that he “needed the girl knocked off right now.”  As the Huffington Post recently reported, the man pleaded guilty to rape, criminal solicitation of murder, and other counts.

  February 15, 2011 at 9:20 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Criminal Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Social Network Websites   Print This Post   One Comment

Wikipedia’s Efforts to Close its Gender Gap

posted by Danielle Citron

Time magazine recently did a true-to-form story on Wikipedia, where guest editors (and our very own featured author) Jonathan Zittrain (see here too), Robert McHenry, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Mike Schroepfer assisted in writing/editing/re-writing a feature entitled Wikipedia’s “Ten Years of Inaccuracy and Remarkable Detail.” As the piece explained, Wikipedia just celebrated its 10th birthday.  The site has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages, quite a feat given that Encyclopedia Brittanica only has 120,000 and only in English.  The Time wiki-like piece notes that Wikipedia has a “diverse, international body of contributors.”

According to The New York Times, most contributors are male.  More specifically, “less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are female.”  This, in turn, has skewed the gender disparity of topics and emphasis.  Wikimedia’s executive director Sue Gardner explains that topics favored by girls such as friendship bracelets can seem short when compared with lengthy articles on something boys typically like such as toy soldiers or baseball cards.  The New York Times notes that a category with five Mexican feminist writers might not seem so impressive when compared with 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons.”

Why is this so?  Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia,” explains that Wikipedia’s early contributors shared “many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd,” including an ideology that “resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.”  He notes that adopting an ideology of openess means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists.”  The demographics of Wikipedia’s editors may also stem, in part, from the tendency of women to be “less willing to assert their opinions in public.”

How Wikipedia is now, and has been, responding is worth noting.  Sue Gardner told the Times that she hopes to raise the share of women contributors through subtle persuasion and outreach to welcome newcomers to Wikipedia.  Dave Hoffman and Salil Mehra’s terrific piece Wikitruth Through Wikiorder demonstrates that the site has already fostered efforts to create a more inclusive environment.  As Hoffman and Mehra explain, Wikipedia has an Arbitration Committee whose volunteer members rule on disputes and set forth concrete rules on how users should behave.  The Arbitration Committee has sanctioned users who make homophobic, ethnic, racial or gendered attacks or who stalk and harass others.  According to Hoffman and Mehra’s empirical study, in cases when either impersonation or anti-social conduct like hateful attacks occur, the Administrative Committee will ban the user in 21% of cases.  Wikipedia’s more than 1,500 administrators, in turn, enforce those rules.  Wikipedia also permits users to report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with editors in its Wikiquette alerts notice board.

  February 1, 2011 at 11:39 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Social Network Websites, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   5 Comments

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).

Read the rest of this post »

  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   Print This Post   5 Comments

Love’s Labour’s Lost in Cyberspace

posted by Danielle Citron

Early this month, a class of  Match.com subscribers sued the service for breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith, and negligent misrepresentation in federal district court in the Northern District of Texas.  The complaint alleges that while Match.com claims to have “millions of active subscribers, well over half of the profiles on its site belong to inactive members who have canceled their membership or allowed their subscriptions to lapse and/or are fake and fraudulent profiles posted by scammers and others.”  It asserts that as for inactive members, Match.com “takes virtually no action to remove these profiles . . . for months and sometimes years,” only removing them after former subscribers call to complain.  As to fake and fraudulent profiles, the complaint states that Match.com “makes little to no effort to vet, police, or remove these profiles.”

According to the complaint, Match.com intentionally failed to remove the profiles of inactive and former subscribers in order to induce members of the class action “to either become or remain paying members.”  The complaint claims that Match.com: (1) “routinely and intentionally represents that there are significantly more active members on the website than there actually are,” (2) falsely labels profiles as “active within [#] days” when the accounts belong to canceled and/or inactive accounts,” (3) sends “former and inactive members ‘winks’ informing them that a potential match is trying to contact them in order to get them to renew their subscriptions (only to find out after they do so that the supposed seeker does not exist), (4) fails “to effectively vet new profiles to determine whether they are fake or fraudulent despite easily discernible ‘red flags’ (including repeated use of imagery and language, and use of notorious IP address origins), and (5) misleads users into believing that the site has equal numbers of male and female members while the “makeup of actual active users is heavily skewed towards single males.”

To support their allegations, Plaintiffs point to changes in the site’s architecture.  For instance, whereas members could themselves hide their profiles after becoming inactive members from 2006 to 2007, only Match.com employees could block a member’s profile from view beginning in 2008.  The complaint also recounts the testimony of former Match.com employees who attest that the company’s database included a “huge” number of “filler profiles.”  As for the complaint’s allegation that Match.com failed to police the site for fraudulent members, the plaintiffs seemingly point to language in the Terms of Use agreement that permits Match.com to review and delete content that violates its terms.  They also suggest that “computer technologies exist that would allow the company to effectively and efficiently police its website for the benefit and safety of its customers.” Read the rest of this post »

  January 27, 2011 at 2:27 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Current Events, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

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