Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Hot-tempered police offers, pushover judges, and vague laws make for a dangerous combination. In July, a controversy erupted in Renton, Washington (a Seattle suburb) when the town’s police department launched a legal assault on an anonymous YouTube user for merely uploading a few sarcastic videos poking fun at the department’s scandals. In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Nicole [...]
My latest Mercatus Center white paper is entitled “Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding The Right Balance.” From the intro: Concerns about children’s privacy are an important part of [the ongoing privacy debate]. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) already mandates certain online-privacy protections for children under the age of [...]
I started to see hints of it last week, but I now believe Google+ is in full stumble-mode over user identity and naming. It looks as though they’ve taken common sense—everyone has one name—and woven it into their terms of service. You can’t use a non-traditional name on Google+. But naming and identity are more [...]
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” [...]
A terrific Radio Berkman podcast this week on “Adventures in Anonymity” featuring Sam Bayard, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and the Assistant Director of the Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project. Along with host Daniel Dennis Jones, Bayard discusses the intersection of anonymity, free speech, defamation law, privacy, and more. In addition to [...]
In a post earlier this week, I discussed Randy Cohen’s “guideline” for anonymous blogging. Specifically, Cohen argued in a recent New York Times piece that, “The effects of anonymous posting have become so baleful that it should be forsworn unless there is a reasonable fear of retribution. By posting openly, we support the conditions in [...]
Randy Cohen, who pens “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine, wrote this week about the “skank case,” or the controversy surrounding the recent legal outing for an anonymous blogger who called fashion model Liskula Cohen a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank.” Thanks to a recent court decision, we now know that the [...]
The Gawker offers a fascinating discussion of the legal right to anonymity: “There is clearly a moral case that some people should be able to join the public debate and retain their anonymity,” Tench told Gawker. “And I think this will have a chilling effect. Blogs like this can only exist anonymously, and I imagine [...]
What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of [...]
May 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.
Anonymity, Reader Comments & Section 230
by Adam Thierer on April 9, 2009 · 13 comments
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at [...]