Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I just released the following statement regarding Facebook’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission of complaintsover changes the company made in December 2009 to what information would appear on users’ profiles: For years, many privacy advocates have insisted that holding companies to their own privacy policies won’t protect consumers because companies can change those policies at a whim. [...]
On the podcast this week, danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, discusses her recent article in First Monday with Ester Hargitai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey. It’s entitled, “Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.” boyd discusses COPPA as it applies to Facebook, namely that children under 13 are not allowed to use the site. She then talks about her research, which looks at whether this restriction is helping parents protect their children’s privacy, and whether it is meeting COPPA’s ultimate goals. boyd discusses her findings, which indicate parents are allowing their children to lie about their age to obtain a Facebook account. According to boyd, parents want guidelines when it comes to data protection, but they do not necessarily want strict requirements. boyd feels that COPPA is not achieving its goal of privacy protection and should be evaluated with more transparency so parents and the public in general know how to protect their privacy.
Yes, we pretty much have. That’s the inescapable conclusion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic First Amendment decision in Brown v. EMA back in June, which struck down a California law governing the sale of “violent video games” to minors. By a 7-2 margin, the court held that video games have First Amendment protections on [...]
[Cross-posted at www.reason.org] While shoppers were hitting the malls Friday–a fair percentage of them no doubt evaluating the many choices of wireless smartphones and service plans available–AT&T said it was withdrawing its FCC application to merge with T-Mobile. AT&T’s move was in response to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s decision to refer the merger to an [...]
Over at TIME.com, I write about the “Russian hackers are in our water plants” min-panic that erupted last week. Turns out it was a false alarm, but that didn’t stop the rhetoric from going on overdrive. Check out this story from Nov. 21, one day before DHS and the FBI announced there was no attack, [...]
On the podcast this week, Joseph Flatley, Features Editor with The Verge, discusses his recent article entitled, “Condo at the End of the World.” Flatley first gives an overview of The Verge, a new website dedicated to in-depth reporting usually seen in traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. He describes The Verge as a website dedicated not only to what technology means, but also to how it affects our lives. The discussion then turns to Flately’s article on survival condos, which have attracted the attention of wealthy citizens concerned about end of the world calamity and economic collapse. According to Flatley, the interest in survival condos has increased after 9/11, and after the recent economic downturn. The “condos” are abandoned missile silos that date back to the cold war. Flatley describes his interviews with different people who are carving out a market for high-end survival real estate, turning these abandoned missile silos into luxury living. He describes how survivalists might live in an end of the world scenario, including what they will eat and how they will stay properly hydrated.
My latest weekly Forbes column (“The Twilight of Copyright?”) considers the future of copyright law and the controversy generated by “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). [See Ryan Radia's mega-post for all the details on the SOPA fight.] After co-editing a big book on copyright law with Wayne Crews nine years ago (Copy Fights: The Future [...]
Over at TIME.com, I write that while Congress mulls an Internet blacklist in SOPA, there are efforts underway to reengineer parts of the Net to make communications more decentralized and censorship-proof. These include distributed and decentralized DNS systems, currencies, and social networks, as well as attempts to circumvent ISPs using mesh networking. It’s not a [...]
I spoke at the MSU/Quello Center’s “Governance of Social Media” workshop on November 11. My talk runs 21 minutes and starts at 1:16:54 in this video. The Q&A begins at 1:41:00. My presentation follows below.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial bill before the House of Representatives aimed at combating “rogue websites,” isn’t just about criminal, foreign-based sites that break U.S. intellectual property laws with impunity. Few dispute that these criminal websites that profit from large-scale counterfeiting and copyright infringement are a public policy problem. SOPA’s provisions, however, extend [...]
January 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
