Third on the headlines today on TechMeme (perhaps the leading tech news aggregator) is this headline: “An Apology To Our Readers,” a heart-felt piece from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington disclosing that a TechCrunch intern had, on at least two occasions, demanded computers from start-ups as compensation for writing favorable blog posts about them on the highly influential site. The intern was immediately suspended and, when the allegation was confirmed, terminated. Arrington made no excuses for Daniel Brusilovsky on account of his age (he’s under 18). You can read Daniel’s response here.
If this incident demonstrates anything, it’s just how essential it is for a site like TechCrunch to, as Arrington promised his readers in closing, “maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.” Arrington went so far as to have “deleted all content created by this person on our blogs”—indeed, “every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network,” which presumably includes comments.
One might take from this the lesson that the press, as it evolves from the newspaper model towards something blog-ier but still hard to pin down precisely, can police itself pretty darn well. Alas, the FTC has taken a much dimmer view of the ability of reputational incentives to discipline the influence that might be exerted by “blogola” payments (cash or in-kind) on editorial discretion and journalistic creation. Continue reading →
While I was away at Oxford University last week, a USA Today story ran entitled “Online Hate Speech: Difficult to Police… and Define.” The author, Theresa Howard, was kind enough to call me for comment on the issue before I left and I made two general points in response to her questions about how serious online hate speech was and how we should combat it:
(1)
“The Internet is a cultural bazaar. It’s the place to find the best and worst of all human elements on display.” What I meant by that, quite obviously, is that you can’t expect to have the most open, accessible communications platform the world has ever known and not also have a handful of knuckleheads who use it spew vile, hateful, ridiculous comments. But we need to put things in perspective: Those jerks represent only a very, very small minority of all online speech and speakers. Hate speech is not the norm online. The overwhelmingly majority of online speech is of a socially acceptable — even beneficial — nature.
(2)
“When advocacy groups work together and use the new technology at their disposal, they have a way of signaling out bad speech and bad ideas.” What I meant by that was that the best way to combat the handful of neanderthals out there that spew hateful garbage is to: (a) use positive speech to drown out hateful speech, and (b) encourage websites to self-police themselves or use community policing techniques to highlight hateful speech and encourage the community to fight back. Importantly, this process is reinforcing. When online communities “flag and tag” objectionable or hateful content, it is easier for better site policing to occur, for social norms to develop, and for better speech to be targeted at that bad speech. Moreover, these new tools and methods are helping groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the National Hispanic Media Coalition to better identify hate speech and then channel their collective energy and efforts to unite the rest of the online community against those hateful speakers and sites.
I think this approach makes more sense than calling in governments to police online hate speech through censorship efforts. This is especially the case because, at the margins, “hate speech” can often be tricky to define and, at least in the United States, regulatory efforts could conflict with legitimate free speech rights. Again, the best way to deal with and marginalize such knuckleheads is with more and better speech. Fight stupidity with sensibility, not censorship.
I’ll be heading to Oxford University this week to participate in an Oxford Internet Institute (OII) forum on the subject of “Child Protection, Free Speech and the Internet: Mapping the Territory and Limitations of Common Ground.” It’s being led by several experts from the OII as well as my good friends John Morris and Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). The aims of this forum are:
- To facilitate a dialogue between NGOs campaigning to protect respectively, child protection and children’s rights online, and freedom of speech and other civil liberties online.
- To promote a better understanding of each others’ positions, to share perspectives and information with a view to identifying areas of common ground and areas of disagreement.
- To identify any shared policy goals, and possible tools to support the achievement of those goals.
- To publicize the findings of the forum in international policy debates about Internet governance and regulation.
Conference participants were asked to submit a 2-3 pg summary of their views on a couple of questions that will be discussed at this event. I have listed those questions, and my answers, down below the fold. It’s my best attempt to date to succinctly outline my views about how to balance content concerns and free speech issues going forward. Continue reading →
Mediapost has published an interview I gave to Omar Tawakol, founder of the BlueKai registry entitled “User Empowerment, Not Regulation, Is The Answer to Privacy Concerns About Targeted Ads” in which I summarize the arguments Adam Thierer and I have been making since our “Principles to Guide the Debate” piece last September.
We argue for user empowerment over restrictive defaults (like “opt-in”) for data use and collection because, as the Supreme Court held in 2000: “Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.”
We promote tools that let users make their own decisions about privacy, not only because those decisions are fundamentally subjective, but because regulatory mandates could stifle the development of online content and commerce.
I also note the parallels between speech controls and privacy regulation, and call for a consistent, principled approach to both:
Since 1997, the Supreme Court has struck down multiple legislative attempts to censor online and offline content [especially the CDA] because there were “less restrictive alternatives” that would not so heavily burden free speech rights. In a 2000 cable-related decision, the Court held that “targeted blocking [by users] is less restrictive than banning, and the Government cannot ban speech if targeted blocking is a feasible and effective means of furthering its compelling interests.”
Courts have struck down other federal and state speech controls because parents had the tools to filter their kids’ access to information online, in video games, etc., as described in my PFF colleague Adam Thierer’s ongoing catalog of these tools…
Many who oppose industry self-regulation are not really “consumer advocates” because they don’t recognize that consumers have many, competing values. Those regulatory advocates are more interested in their preferred one-size-fits-all mandates than in empowering users to determine their own privacy preferences.
Like advocates of censorship, privacy zealots assert great dangers to which citizens are supposedly oblivious but which urgently require government intervention-dismissing arguments to the contrary as either uninformed or irresponsible.
The comments on the interview are equally worth reading. Jeff Chester, who has made a career out of attacking advertising, quickly posted a comment dismissing, but ignoring, my arguments about consumer welfare as corporate propaganda—just as he did with his comment on the post Adam and I wrote in June about congressional hearings on the issue featuring Chester (and Scott Cleland, the right-wing “Bizarro Chester“). I’ve had it with Chester’s ad hominem attacks on the motives of those who disagree with him, as I explained in my reply to Chester: Continue reading →
The leading trade associations in the online advertising industry have just released their new self-regulatory principles—the first comprehensive self-regulatory principles industry has produced, which track closely with the suggested guidelines released by the FTC in February.
I commend the industry for setting a new standard in transparency, consumer control and data security. These Principles do much to empower Americans to make their own decisions about privacy, but I fear that many critics of so-called “targeted advertising” will
never be satisfied, no matter how high industry raises the bar.
These critics have insisted that ordinary users can’t be trusted to make the “right decisions” about privacy and have insisted on imposing restrictive default “opt-in” rules for the online data collection that makes online advertising valuable to websites that rely on ad revenue. Such pre-emptive privacy regulation would stunt the growth of revenue for the “Free” online content and services we’ve all come to take for granted. During a time of economic recession, and as traditional media like newspapers struggle to make the transition from print to the Internet, it’s more important than ever that policymakers allow self-regulation to evolve. Only by doing so can we expect continued innovation and creativity online. We must all remember: There is no free lunch!
I’ll lead a panel discussion on July 10 on Capitol Hill about “Regulating Online Advertising: What Will it Mean for Consumers, Culture & Journalism?” Please RSVP here.
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz warned yesterday that companies involved in Web advertising face their “last chance” to “voluntarily” adopt stricter policies governing the use and collection of consumer information, Reuters reports. This isn’t the first time the FTC has threatened the advertising industry with regulation, but it signals a sense of immediacy that may pressure industry leaders to change their practices in coming weeks.
Leibowitz presumably wants to quell widespread concern that Internet companies like Google and AT&T have “excessive control” over consumer information. But what’s excessive about using information that individuals have voluntarily handed over for marketing purposes, subject to legally enforceable rules laid out from the get-go?
Users ultimately control their data, not firms. After all, only data that users transmit can be collected. When a user visits a website, their IP address may be recorded, and when a user submits a query to a search engine, the search term can be logged. This is how the Internet has always worked.
Not all consumers understand what information is gathered about them as they browse online. The best way to protect such users is not through regulation, but by educating — and, therefore, empowering — users. Volumes have been written on privacy and data security, and the ongoing TLF series “Privacy Solutions” offers a growing body of tips on how consumers can achieve the level of privacy that suits them.
Understandably, some people are uncomfortable with their queries being logged, and would prefer that websites simply not track any data. Some sites are willing to do just that — Cuil, a search engine launched in 2008, promises to never log IP addresses or even use cookies (as Jim has noted). Other anonymity solutions rely on secure virtual tunnels that can mask users’ actual IP addresses.
Still, no matter what the FTC does, transmitting data in plaintext over the Internet will never be truly “safe.” Robust end-to-end encryption is the only surefire method of ensuring information cannot be seen by anybody except the sender and the recipient. Even then, information is only as safe to the extent that the party at the other end of the line can be trusted.
Continue reading →
As TLF readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation. As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens’ advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988. Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill‘s vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that “space is a place, not a program.”
We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government’s space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station. We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.
Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D
The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the “Gap” in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.
Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said “It’s time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let’s take the two billion dollars in the candidates’ plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D.”
The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to “issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] … to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities’ for transporting humans to the ISS”-the “Capability D” of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.
Szoka continued, “Let’s have an American competition in space – to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government’s investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry – commercial orbital human spaceflight.” Continue reading →
The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today. Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:
the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.
I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this. Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:
The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.
Thoughts?
Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the “importance of privacy” as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture makes the point brilliantly—showing:
locations where [Flickr] users are more likely to post their photos as “public,” which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red.
Of course, geography is just one dimension across which users may vary in their attitudes about privacy, but the map makes the basic point about variation very well. Seeing what users
actually do in real life says a lot more about their preferences than merely polling them about what they think they care about in the abstract—as my colleagues Solveig Singleton and Jim Harper argued brilliantly in their 2001 paper With A Grain of Salt: What Consumer Privacy Surveys Don’t Tell Us (SSRN).
Google has just 
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