Archive for the ‘Social Network Websites’ Category
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
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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
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The Ugly Persistence of Internet Celebrity
posted by Danielle Citron
Many desperately try to garner online celebrity. They host You Tube channels devoted to themselves. They share their thoughts in blog postings and on social network sites. They post revealing pictures of themselves on Flickr. To their dismay though, no one pays much attention. But for others, the Internet spotlight finds them and mercilessly refuses to yield ground. For instance, in 2007, a sports blogger obtained a picture of a high-school pole vaulter, Allison Stokke, at a track meet and posted it online. Within days, her picture spread across the Internet, from message boards and sport sites to porn sites and social network profiles. Impostors created fake profiles of Ms. Stokke on social network sites, and Ms. Stokke was inundated with emails from interested suitors and journalists. At the time, Ms. Stokke told the Washington Post that the attention felt “demeaning” because the pictures dominated how others saw her rather than her pole-vaulting accomplishments.
Time’s passage has not helped Stokke shake her online notoriety. Sites continuously updated their photo galleries with pictures of Stokkes taken at track meets. Blogs boasted of finding pictures of Stokke at college with headings like “Your 2010 Allison Stokke Update,” “Allison Stokke’s Halloween Cowgirl Outfit Accentuates the Total Package,” and “Only Known Allison Stokke Cal Picture Found.” Postings include obscene language. For instance, a Google search of her name on a safety setting yields 129,000 results while one with no safety setting has 220,000 hits. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a wiki devoted to her (though Wikipedia has faithfully taken down entries about Ms. Stokke).
January 30, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Technology, Tort Law, Wiki
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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
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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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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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Digital Lives of 2.0 People, Not Locked In But Extended Out
posted by Danielle Citron
Reviewing the movie The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto in this month’s New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith warns readers of the perils of social network sites like Facebook where “life is turned into a database.” According to Smith, Facebook “locks us” into a system designed by a college nerd to resemble “a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make ‘choices’ (which means, finally, purchases).” Smith writes:
“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”
Smith worries about her students and other “2.0 kids.” She contrasts “1.0 people” who use social media tools to connect with others in an outward-facing way with “2.0 kids” who employ them to turn inward and towards the trivial. 2.0 people, Smith fears, are embedded in the software, avatars who don’t realize that “what makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” She wonders: “what if 2.0 people feel their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?” In Smith’s view, Mark Zuckerberg tamed “the wild west of the Internet” to “fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul,” risking the extinction of the “private person who is a mystery to the world and–which is more important — to herself.”
Smith’s review recalls Neil Postman’s critique of television culture and Benjamin Barber’s warnings about contemporary consumerism. While television helped us amuse ourselves to death and pervasive pop culture produces shoppers, not thinkers, social network sites turn youth culture into over-sharing, unthinking, eager-to-please avatars who “watch the reality-TV show Bride Wars because their friends are.” Yet this can’t be the whole story. Whether 41 or 21, social network participants live in the real world, integrating their online activities seamlessly into their daily lives. Far more goes on in social network sites like Facebook than sharing information to “make others like you” as Smith suggests. On Facebook and other popular social media sites, people join groups of every stripe. They work, as Miriam Cherry’s terrific new article Virtual Work addresses. They build reputations in ways that can enhance offline careers. They join study groups. In many respects, social media sites provide platforms for genuine participation far more than just Government 2.0 engagement. Far from deadening the everyday citizen, social media platforms can resemble Alexis de Toqueville’s town meeting, John Dewey’s schools, and Cynthia Estlund’s workplace. Of course, citizenship participation online is different–it is not the face-to-face interaction envisioned by Toqueville, Dewey, and Estlund. But even with the challenges brought by internet-mediated interactions, 2.0 kids are more than denuded avatars.
November 10, 2010 at 10:56 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Health Privacy Paradigm Shift: From Consent to Reciprocal Transparency
posted by Frank Pasquale
Computational innovation may improve health care by creating stores of data vastly superior to those used by traditional medical research. But before patients and providers “buy in,” they need to know that medical privacy will be respected. We’re a long way from assuring that, but new ideas about the proper distribution and control of data might help build confidence in the system.
William Pewen’s post “Breach Notice: The Struggle for Medical Records Security Continues” is an excellent rundown of recent controversies in the field of electronic medical records (EMR) and health information technology (HIT). As he notes,
Many in Washington have the view that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) functions as a protective regulatory mechanism in medicine, yet its implementation actually opened the door to compromising the principle of research consent, and in fact codified the use of personal medical data in a wide range of business practices under the guise of permitted “health care operations.” Many patients are not presented with a HIPAA notice but instead are asked to sign a combined notice and waiver that adds consents for a variety of business activities designed to benefit the provider, not the patient. In this climate, patients have been outraged to receive solicitations for purchases ranging from drugs to burial plots, while at the same time receiving care which is too often uncoordinated and unsafe. It is no wonder that many Americans take a circumspect view of health IT.
Privacy law’s consent paradigm means that, generally speaking, data dissemination is not deemed an invasion of privacy if it is consented to. The consent paradigm requires individuals to decide whether or not, at any given time, they wish to protect their privacy. Some of the brightest minds in cyberlaw have focused on innovation designed to enable such self-protection. For instance, interdisciplinary research groups have proposed “personal data vaults” to manage the emanations of sensor networks. Jonathan Zittrain’s article on “privication” proposed that the same technologies used by copyrightholders to monitor or stop dissemination of works could be adopted by patients concerned about the unauthorized spread of health information.
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October 26, 2010 at 8:24 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyberlaw, DRM, Privacy, Privacy (Medical), Social Network Websites, Technology
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Scholarship 2.0: The New Frontier?
posted by Danielle Citron
I have been advising the Maryland Law Review for some time now and this year’s Board has been particularly creative in their thinking about scholarship and its potential impact. They have an interesting idea for the future of legal scholarship, one that I believe worth sharing and discussing. The Maryland Law Review currently publishes in print and online professional and student pieces and would like to ensure that the pieces facilitate ongoing dia
logue. In a turn that I will call Scholarship 2.0, the Maryland Law Review would like to harness interactive technologies on their website to permit readers to engage with the work and to post videos on the topic. As the Board has explained to me, they would like to to use technology “not only to spread the ideas expressed in the pieces, but also to provide an opportunity for the work to change, grow, and evolve as more people are exposed and have a chance to contribute to the conversation.”
To that end, the Maryland Law Review will soon begin to utilize technologies to begin that conversation, including posting videos of interviews with professor, or taped debates between them, regarding articles. Readers will have a chance to take part in the conversation through a Comment feature. As the Editor in Chief Maggie Grace and Senior Online Articles Editor Ted Reilly told me: “The best products of academia are not closed from debate or question, but rather are discussed, challenged, and strengthened by wider discourse. It is our hope that with the addition of these technologies we can foster dialogues that help viewers pose questions, challenge accepted notions, share novel ideas, and develop a greater understanding of law and its application.” How else might the Maryland Law Review put this idea into practice? Any thoughts or suggestions for my enterprising students?
October 4, 2010 at 9:21 am
Posted in: Bright Ideas, Current Events, Law Talk, Social Network Websites
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Future of the Internet Symposium: The Role of Infrastructure Management in Determining Internet Freedom
posted by admin
Last week, Facebook reportedly blocked users of Apple’s new Ping social networking service from reaching Facebook friends because the company was concerned about the prospect of massive amounts of traffic inundating its servers. This is precisely the type of architectural lockdown Jonathan Zittrain brilliantly portends in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Contemplating this service blockage and re-reading Jonathan’s book this weekend have me thinking about the role of private industry infrastructure management in shaping Internet freedom.
The Privatization of Internet Governance
I’m heading to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I will be speaking on a panel with Vinton Cerf and members of the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance about “Core Internet Values and the Principles of Internet Governance Across Generations.” What role will “infrastructure management” values increasingly play as a private industry ordering of the flow of information on the Internet? The privatization of Internet governance is an area that has not received enough attention. Internet scholars are often focused on content. Internet governance debates often reduce into an exaggerated dichotomy, as Milton Mueller describes it, between the extremes of cyberlibertarianism and cyberconservativism. The former can resemble utopian technological determinism and the later is basically a state sovereignty model that wants to extend traditional forms of state control to the Internet.
The cyberlibertarian and cyberconservative perspectives are indistinguishable in that they both tend to disregard the infrastructure governance sinews already permeating the Internet’s technical architecture. There is also too much attention to institutional governance battles and to the Internet Governance Forum itself, which is, in my opinion, a red herring because it has no policy-making authority and fails to address important controversies.
Where there is attention to the role of private sector network management and traffic shaping, much analysis has focused on “last mile” issues of interconnection rather than the Internet’s backbone architecture. Network neutrality debates are a prime example of this. Another genre of policy attention addresses corporate social responsibility at the content level, such as the Facebook Beacon controversy and the criticism Google initially took for complying with government requests to delete politically sensitive YouTube videos and filter content. These are critical issues, but equally important and less visible decisions occur at the architectural level of infrastructure management. I’d like to briefly mention two examples of private sector infrastructure management functions that also have implications for Internet freedom and innovation: private sector Internet backbone peering agreements and the use of deep packet inspection for network management.
Private Sector Internet Backbone Peering Agreements
For the Internet to successfully operate, Internet backbones obviously must connect with one another. These backbone networks are owned and operated primarily by private telecommunications companies such as British Telecom, Korea Telecom, Verizon, AT&T, Internet Initiative Japan and Comcast. Independent commercial networks conjoin either at private Internet connection points between two companies or at multi-party Internet exchange points (IXPs).
IXPs are the physical junctures where different companies’ backbone trunks interconnect and exchange Internet packets and route them toward their appropriate destinations. One of the largest IXPs (based on throughput of peak traffic) is the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) in Frankfurt, Germany. This IXP connects hundreds of Internet providers, including content delivery networks and web hosting services as well as Internet service providers. Google, Sprint, Level3, and Yahoo all connect through DE-CIX, as well as to many other IXPs.
Other interconnection points involve private contractual arrangements between two telecommunications companies to connect for the purpose of exchanging Internet traffic. Making this connection at private interconnection points requires physical interconnectivity and equipment but it also involves agreements about cost, responsibilities, and performance. There are generally two types of agreements – peering agreements and transit agreements. Peering agreements refer to mutually beneficial arrangements whereby no money is exchanged among companies agreeing to exchange traffic at interconnection points. In a transit agreement, one telecommunications company agrees to pay a backbone provider for interconnection. There is no standard approach for the actual agreement to peer or transit, with some interconnections involving formal contracts and others based upon verbal agreements between companies’ technical personnel.
Interconnection agreements are an unseen regime. They have few directly relevant statutes, almost no regulatory oversight, and little transparency in private contracts and agreements. Yet these interconnection points have important economic and implications to the future of the Internet. They certainly have critical infrastructure implications depending on whether they provide sufficient redundancy, capacity and security. Disputes over peering and transit agreements, not just problems with physical architecture, have created network outages in the past. The effect on free market competition is another concern, related to possible lack of competition in Internet backbones, dominance by a small number of companies, and peering agreements among large providers that could be detrimental to potential competitors. Global interconnection disputes have been numerous and developing countries have complained about transit costs to connect to dominant backbone providers. The area of interconnection patents is another emerging concern with implications to innovation. Interconnection points are also obvious potential points of government filtering and censorship. Because of the possible implications to innovation and freedom, greater transparency and insight into the arrangements and configurations at these sites would be very helpful.
Network Management via Deep Packet Inspection
Another infrastructure management technique with implications to the future of the Internet is the use of deep packet inspection (DPI) for network management traffic shaping. DPI is a capability manufactured into network devices (e.g. firewalls) that scrutinizes the entire contents of a packet, including the payload as well as the packet header. This payload is the actual information content of the packet. The bulk of Internet traffic is information payload, versus the small amount of administrative and routing information contained within packet headers. ISPs and other information intermediaries have traditionally used packet headers to route packets, perform statistical analysis, and perform routine network management and traffic optimization. Until recent years, it has not been technically viable to inspect the actual content of packets because of the enormous processing speeds and computing resources necessary to perform this function.
The most publicized instances of DPI have involved the ad-serving practices of service providers wishing to provide highly targeted marketing based on what a customer views or does on the Internet. Other attention to DPI focuses on concerns about state use of deep packet inspection for Internet censorship. One of the originally intended uses of DPI, and still an important use, is for network security. DPI can help identify viruses, worms, and other unwanted programs embedded within legitimate information and help prevent denial of service attacks. What will be the implications of increasingly using DPI for network management functions, legitimately concerned with network performance, latency, and other important technical criterion?
Zittrain discusses how the value of trust was designed into the Internet’s original architecture. The new reality is that the end-to-end architectural principle historically imbued in Internet design has waned considerably over the years with the introduction of Network Address Translation (NATs), firewalls, and other networks intermediaries. Deep packet inspection capability, engineered into routers, will further erode the end-to-end principle, an architectural development which will have implications to the future of the Internet’s architecture as well as to the future of individual privacy and network neutrality.
As I head to the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, Zittrain’s book is a reminder of what is at stake at the intersection of technical expediency and Internet freedom and how private ordering, rather than governments or new Internet governance institutions, will continue to shape the future of the Internet.
September 7, 2010 at 11:11 am
Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Politics, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Web 2.0
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What Will Be the Defining Idea of the Coming Decade?
posted by Daniel Solove
For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s The Chronicle Review, the editors asked several scholars for answers to the question: “What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?”
Here’s the list of the people they asked: Jaron Lanier, Daniel J. Solove, Peter Singer, Elaine Howard Ecklund, Gwenda Kaczor, Jonathan Haidt, Parker J. Palmer, Camille Paglia, Yi-Fu Tuan, Michael Glenwood Gibbs, Daniel J. Cohen, James Elkins, Mary Beard, Linda K. Kerber, Geoffrey Moss, Henry Petroski, Alondra Nelson, Brian Knutson, Saleem H. Ali, Steve Brodner, Stephon H.S. Alexander, Steven Landsburg, and Pat Shipman.
You can find all the answers here.
My answer is a short essay called Dizzied by Data. It begins:
In his short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined an infinitely large library containing all books. Although the library was wondrous, people had no way of finding the right book. Much like Borges’s library, the information age has presented us with a dizzying amount of data. The past decade witnessed the rise of the interactive Internet—Web 2.0—where people not only consume information but also add to it. Millions of people started blogging; social-networking sites like Facebook amassed half a billion users; and sites like Wikipedia enticed people to collaborate and share their expertise.
To cope with all this data, we created new ways to find it and analyze it. Search engines like Google revolutionized our ability to locate information, and data-mining technologies were developed to detect patterns and make judgments about people’s interests and behavior.
Over the next decade, the ability to search for information and to analyze it will mature dramatically. . . .
For the rest, click here.
August 31, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Social Network Websites
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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.
Read the rest of this post »
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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No More Anonymous Comments for Me
posted by Frank Pasquale
After an absence from the blogosphere, I look forward to the brief e-conversations that comment threads create. But I really don’t enjoy getting anonymous, negative comments. While anonymity has many important purposes, I’m not the first to notice that it can erode the type of community necessary for certain types of discussions. As Jaron Lanier writes,
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction. (You are Not a Gadget, p. 4)
To elaborate: how does one argue, or even converse, with an “anon”? How do I know that “anon” is not just a stealth astroturfer willing to make any argument on behalf of a commercial sponsor? The game of internet conversation only seems worth the candle if one is addressing someone with a coherent set of beliefs that can be appealed to in order to make one’s argument. Exchanges with the anonymous feel like a Turing test, where I’m constantly trying to figure out if the person on the other side of the comment is actually writing in good faith or is a troll up for lulz.
So I’ll freely delete anonymous comments on my posts if they seem unhelpful, cavilling, or carping. I think this is fully consistent with our extant comment policy, but at least I now have this post to more fully explain myself if an “anon” demands that his or her comment appear.
Image Credit: From this site; the internet assures me it’s the Ring of Gyges, so it must be, right?
June 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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The Star Wars Kid Strikes Back
posted by Daniel Solove
In The Future of Reputation, I wrote about the Star Wars Kid, the teenager who made a video of himself pretending to fight with a lightsaber. The video was uploaded to the Web without his consent, and he was ridiculed around the world, his video being downloaded tens of millions of times.
For years, nobody knew what happened to him. A news article now reports:
Ghyslain Raza – or to the internet,Star Wars Kid – didn’t feel famous, or funny. He felt harassed, the victim of the most visible bullying in history. Ghyslain dropped out of his Quebec high school, was diagnosed with depression, and checked into a psychiatric ward for children.
Ghyslain and his parents would later sue the families of the three classmates who leaked the video in 2003, for around $250,000. According to the lawsuit, which resulted in a settlement, “Ghyslain had to endure, and still endures today, harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large.”
But after eight years of laughs at his expense – and a few campaigns in his defense – Ghyslain is back. Now in his early 20s, he’s reemerged as the president of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières, a conservation society that aims to preserve the cultural heritage of his hometown of Trois-Rivières.
Revenge of the Sith this isn’t, but he’s putting his litigious experience to some use, getting his law degree at McGill University in Montreal.
Hat tip: Josh Blackman
June 6, 2010 at 12:49 am
Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0
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Can We Rely on Privacy Policies?
posted by Woodrow Hartzog
With the recent case of Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., involving a newspaper website that outed an anonymous commenter who was a judge, we invited Woodrow Hartzog to write a post about these issues. Woodrow is the author of a terrific article about the enforceability of the privacy policies (via promissory estoppel) of online communities and social network websites, forthcoming in Temple Law Review. — DJS
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Virtually every website you visit has a privacy policy. These policies are often incorporated into a website’s terms of use. This attachment of contractual obligation to privacy policies has significant implications. Like many standard-form contracts, these policies are often vague or practically unreadable, leaving most users with only a general sense of how their personal information will be treated. Yet, privacy policies often begin with promissory language along the lines of “we are committed to protecting your privacy and handling any personal information we obtain from you with care and respect.” Thus, the language in privacy policies raises a number of questions. Are website promises to protect anonymity binding? Can these promises create a reasonable expectation of privacy?
The recent spate of lawsuits addressing a website’s privacy policies and terms of use seems important beyond the First Amendment implications aptly addressed by others. A few of these decisions seem to pop up every year. Yet, inevitably, most of them provide only a cursory analysis of the effect of contracts on privacy. As a result, it’s unsurprising that these decisions are often met with ambivalence or a general sense of irrelevance. Many commentators rightly observe that courts are reluctant to find actionable damages for adherents to online agreements when websites violate their own terms.
Yet a few of these lawsuits seem to buck the trend by focusing on a user’s reliance on representations of confidentiality by a website. The recent decision in McVicker v. King, No. 09-cv-436 (W.D. Pa. March 3, 2010) is worth noting as an explicit finding that a privacy policy can create an expectation of privacy for users.
In this employment dispute, the plaintiff William McVicker subpoenaed Trib Total Media, publisher of the YourSouthHills.com, for information disclosing the identities of a number of users commenting pseudonymously on their website. The plaintiff argued that the identities of the users were needed to impeach the testimony of the defendants who fired him.
May 2, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Social Network Websites
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Ambivalent about the Boobquake
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
You’ve probably seen it by now. First, a Neanderthal Iranian cleric scolded women for wearing “immodest” Western clothing which of course leads to adultery, which of course causes earthquakes. In response, blogger Jen McCreight announced:
On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake.
Within hours, thousands more had signed up for the “boobquake.” There are currently almost 150,000 confirmed attendees, and a variety of news stories have discussed the phenomenon.
I have to say, I’m conflicted about this one. Read the rest of this post »
April 24, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Social Network Websites
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Googling Employees: Why Your Online Reputation Matters
posted by Daniel Solove
According to a study by Microsoft,70% of employers (in the United States) rejected potential employees because of information found out about them online. Interestingly, the numbers are much less in other countries (41% in the UK, 16% in Germany, and 14% in France)
However, fewer than 15% of people believe their online information will matter in getting hired.
The study was “conducted with 2,500 consumers, HR managers and recruitment professionals in the US, UK, Germany and France.”
According to the study:
In the United States, 89% of recruiters and HR professionals surveyed find it appropriate to consider professional online data when assessing a candidate; 84% of them think it is proper to consider personal data posted online.
As I have indicated previously, most employers who use information they find online about job candidates lack a policy for doing so fairly and ethically (and sometimes legally). Should prospective employees be told when their employers google them? Should they have a right to respond? What procedures are in place to ensure that the information found online in fact relates to the job candidate and not another person with the same name? Is any distinction made between information that a person voluntarily posts and information others post about them? Are any steps taken to make sure the information is true and not a spurious rumor? What boundaries are there for online searching? Improperly gaining access to a person’s profile on Facebook, for example, could be a violation of law depending upon how it is done.
The Microsoft study is available here. This data is much more extensive than what I found when I was doing research for The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. I didn’t have much by way of statistics back in 2007, but I discussed a few interesting anecdotes in Chapter 2.
Below is a chart from the study listing the kinds of information employers found most discrediting.
Hat tip: Adjunct Law Prof Blog
March 15, 2010 at 8:15 am
Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0
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