Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Given the importance of privacy self-help—that is, setting your browser to control what it reveals about you when you surf the Web—I was concerned to hear that Google, among others, had circumvented third-party cookie blocking that is a default setting of Apple’s Safari browser. Jonathan Mayer of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society published a [...]
In a post here last month on “Two Paradoxes of Privacy Regulation,” I discussed some of the interesting — and to me, troubling — similarities between rising calls for online privacy regulation and ongoing attempts to enact various types of controls on online speech or expression. In that essay, I argued that while most privacy [...]
When the government tells someone to shut up, we call it censorship and the First Amendment requires the government to defend its regulation. But what if the government just says, “Shhhh… could you please turn that down?” Rep. Anna Eshoo’s Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (“CALM Act” - HR 1084) would do just that: require the FCC to [...]
WordPress has experienced a major security vulnerability, with a worm making its way around the ‘Net, attacking earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately, because of the hard work of the WordPress open source community, the current (2.8.4) and most recent (2.8.3) versions are immune. Yet as with any piece of program, some users haven’t upgraded. In the case [...]
What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf] by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19 Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight [...]
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social media services has magnified the old problem of cyber-squatting: Every new service represents the possibility that someone else might claim your name, or your organization’s trademark, as a user name before you do! This problem is especially significant where user names correspond to vanity URLs, as with Twitter and, [...]
by Eric Beach & Adam Thierer In our ongoing “Privacy Solutions Series” we have been outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers a more effective alternative to government-mandated regulation [...]
The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy [...]
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer Progress Snapshot 4.19 (PDF) Since the fall of 2008, a debate has raged in Washington over “targeted online advertising,” an ominous-sounding shorthand for the customization of Internet ads to match the interests of users. Not only are these ads more relevant and therefore less annoying to Internet users than [...]
By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka Whatever ordinary Americans actually think about online privacy, it remains a hot topic inside the Beltway. While much of that amorphous concern focuses on government surveillance and government access to information about web users, many in Washington have focused on targeted online advertising by private companies as a dire [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
