Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
[Cross-posted at Reason.org] This week Google announced that it is grouping 60 of its Web services, such as Gmail, the Google+ social network, YouTube and Google Calendar, under a single privacy policy that would allow the company to share user data between any of those services. These changes will be effective March 1. Although we [...]
[Cross posted from TechFreedom] Today, the Digital Advertising Alliance, a group of leading digital ad agencies and online ad networks, unveiled a campaign to bring attention to AdChoices, its icon-based system allowing users to opt-out of behavioral advertising. The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom: In the 1990s, Congress tried [...]
I thought Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, did a nice job on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” show addressing the contentious question of whether government should be regulating food advertising in order to somehow make American kids healthier. Todd pointed out how the advertising guidelines currently being developed [...]
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein had a terrific column yesterday (Human Knowledge, Brought to You By…) on one of my favorite subjects: how advertising is the great subsidizer of the press, media, content, and online services. Klein correctly notes that “our informational commons, or what we think of as our informational commons, is, for the [...]
[Cross-posted at Reason.org] One of the more critically praised films this year has been Shame, which has been in limited release around the country since December. Although it’s an independent production, the film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, a major studio, and stars Michael Fassbender, an actor who appears to be in the [...]
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.
Come hear the other side of the privacy debate! Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) will lead a discussion among policy experts united by a desire to address demonstrated dangers of data abuse without giving up the value created by data as the vital currency of the digital economy. The Roundtable is Wednesday, September 14, 8-9:30 am in Congressional Visitors Center [...]
For CNET this morning, I offer five crucial corrections to the Protect IP Act, which was passed out of committee in the Senate back in May. Yesterday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, told a Silicon Valley audience that the House was working on its own version and would introduce it in [...]
Do-Not-Track is not inconceivable itself. It’s like the word “inconceivable” in the movie The Princess Bride. I do not think it means what people think it means—how it is meant to work and how it is likely to offer poor results. Take Mike Swift’s reporting for MercuryNews.com on a study showing that online advertising companies [...]
Vivek Wadhwa, who is affiliated with Harvard Law School and is director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, has a terrific column in today’s Washington Post warning of the dangers of government trying to micromanage high-tech innovation and the Digital Economy from above. For reasons I have never been able to understand, the [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
