Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
As Berin mentioned last week, we have a new paper out on proposals to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. We generically refer to those COPPA-expansion efforts as “COPPA 2.0.” Hence, the title of our paper: “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.” To [...]
Says Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. I wonder what the FTC will think about this prospect in the report Congress asked them to send this year about video games. I think it’s safe to assume that the thought of life-like sex and violence will create a true technopanic.
Via Kevin Kelly I see that at some point Forbes magazine produced this chart measuring technology diffusion rates for various media and communications technologies since their year of inception. I found this of great interest because, since the mid-90s, I have been putting together various charts and tables illustrating technological diffusion [most recently I did [...]
Recall a couple of years ago when I lauded Google – and also picked on them – for making customer data “more anonymous”? “‘Anonymous’ is correctly regarded as an absolute condition,” I wrote. “Like pregnancy, anonymity is either there or it’s not. Modifying the word with a relative adjective like ‘more’ is a curious use [...]
I’m reading a couple of interesting books right now [see my Shelfari list here] including Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy by Lawrence Friedman of the Stanford School of Law. The book examines the legal and social norms governing privacy, reputation, sex, and morals over the past two [...]
Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.” As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most [...]
Lee Gomes writes on Fobes.com with a clear-eyed reminder that privacy regulation has been costly, yet failed to deliver. Lovers of government intervention will, of course, take this as an argument to double-down.
craigslist has filed a complaint against South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, seeking to enjoin him from prosecuting the site for displaying the solicitations to prostitution that sometimes appear there. The complaint cites section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the First Amendment, and a few other laws that craigslist believes protect it from liability. [...]
California has asked the Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that a California video game statute was unconstitutional. [Game Politics.com has complete coverage, and there's more over at Ars and USA Today's Game Hunters blog.] Brief background: In late February, the Ninth Circuit upheld an August 2007 ruling by [...]
. . . you’d think that you would follow the “Speeches” link from the home page on Whitehouse.gov. If you do, today you see just four speeches. I went looking for the text of his national security speech at the National Archives today. The New York Times has it but Whitehouse.gov doesn’t? What’s going on [...]
January 29, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
