Archive: Year: 2014

Two years ago, on the morning of the 2012 election in the United States, I got an email with an urgent subject line: "You should write the story of how Facebook blew an opportunity to turn out 300k voters." The sender, a veteran progressive online activist who would prefer to remain anonymous, was upset for good reason. The election was bound to be close, and as of 10am that morning he hadn't yet seen an "I'm Voting" button on his Facebook page, nor had another colleague of his. Nor was one on my own Facebook page. Given that when Facebook deployed a similar "I Voted" button in 2010, and added messages in users' News Feeds showing them the names and faces...

Don't Forget Google has begun scrubbing some links from search results in Europe, and as James Ball reports, some of the first items to be "forgotten" are articles from The Guardian. He warns, "The [European high court] ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression--our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden." More: MarketingLand's Danny Sullivan has a list of "forgotten" pieces, based on notices publishers have been receiving from Google. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford says we should run a controlled experiment on Facebook: "Rather than assuming Terms of Service are equivalent to informed consent, platforms should offer opt-in settings where users can choose to join experimental panels. If they don’t opt in, they aren’t forced to...

Corrupt Personalization A new story by Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman details the almost completely global scope of the NSA's surveillance activities, covering 193 countries, and explains how Americans' information is being swept up in that data collection. According to a recently disclosed letter from DNI director James Clapper to Senator Ron Wyden, the FBI and CIA are regularly drawing on NSA PRISM data for domestic investigations. TechDirt's Mike Masnick says "this would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment." ProPublica's Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson have put the NSA's programs on one two-dimensional chart, grouping them by whether they are focused on foreign or domestic targets and how much they collect bulk or targeted data. Glenn...

Contagious For one week in January 2012, researchers at Facebook deliberately skewed the News Feed content of nearly 700,000 users, some shown content deemed to contain more happy words, other shown more that was sad. A week later, users were somewhat more likely to post especially positive or negative content themselves based on how their feeds had been skewed, according to a new study by Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This news set off quite a firestorm of commentary over the weekend. The research study was first noticed by the New Scientist late last week and then Sophie Weiner of Animal New York tore into it as "manipulation." Soon, ">Kashmir...

Pitches and Forks Re/Code's Amy Schatz reports that FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has been having meetings this week with Silicon Valley VCs and executives from several start-ups to hear their opinions on his controversial net neutrality proposal. In written testimony, Chris Soghoian, the ACLU's principal technologist, told the German Parliament's committee investigating the NSA surveillance scandal that if they want to protect Germany and its people from the NSA their police and intelligence services will also have to also give up their ability to monitor their own people's communications. According to newly unsealed court documents, Facebook is fighting a so far losing battle to challenge warrants for account data being demanded by the Manhattan district attorney's office. The case revolves around whether the...

Unwarranted The US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that police need warrants to search cell phones of people they arrest. It's unclear from the ruling whether the Court's substantive understanding of the pervasive personal data collected on today's phones might also cause it to reconsider the 1979 Smith v Maryland decision, which held that no warrant was needed to obtain the "pen register" of an individual's phone call records held by the telephone company. Such so-called "business records" obviously also reveal a great deal of an individual's private life. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long opposed warrantless searches of computers and mobile phones, is celebrating the court's decision by printing a special Supreme Court set of this phone sticker, reports its co-founder John...

Brigade, the $9 million Silicon Valley civic engagement startup backed by billionaire Sean Parker that is promoting itself as restoring voters "to the center of our democracy," got a hard whack on Twitter today after it unveiled more details about its leadership team on its nascent website. First, Natalia Oberti Noguera, the founder and CEO of the Pipeline Fellowship, an angel investing bootcamp for women, took a screenshot of the company's leadership page (see above), which features six white men, and wrote, "If you're 'for the people," @JoinBrigade, it would be great to have your leadership better represent 'the people.'" Alison Burke, a social media strategist for the Brookings Institution, tweeted, "Can you really be 'for the people' w/ 100%...

Media Futures Here are yesterday's winners of $3.4 million in grants from the Knight News Challenge, including ten winners of the Prototype Fund, all focused on ideas and projects aimed at strengthening the open Internet. The winning projects included two major initiatives by public libraries to subsidize free MiFi cards that students can take home, and several efforts to combat online censorship and increase personal user security. In a nice ironic juxtaposition, on the same day Comcast and NBC Universal announced the winners of their first-ever hackathon, which had the theme of shaping "The Future of Media & Technology." The winning projects include tools that help deliver interesting TV content to users, deliver custom news stories to users, and enable users to...

Trafficking Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have teamed up to cosponsor the Wi-Fi Innovation Act, which would make more spectrum available for unlicensed use, reports Marguerite Reardon for CNet. Harold Feld of Public Knowledge applauds, saying "If passed, the bill would resolve an ugly traffic jam between the FCC and the Department of Transportation that is needlessly delaying the next generation of Wi-Fi technology." Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson's crypto-party for Members of Congress to learn more how to protect their digital communications, co-hosted with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) is taking place this morning. Trainers from Access, the Internet freedom group, will be on hand. Remember when the right thing to do with your WiFi was to leave your network...

Ducks If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck…it must be a campaign for president in 2016 by Hillary Clinton. So says Chris Cilizza in the Washington Post, connecting the dots between the high-level campaign operatives working for Ready for Hillary, the top political endorsements, the attacks from the likes of Karl Rove, and the new Clinton memoir, which comes out for real this week. Robert Gibbs predicts that Clinton's book tour will collect a lot of data: "They’ll use all these events she goes to acquire information that can later be purchased by some political entity – whether it’s her campaign, or a super-PAC, or both. These will be people who’ll be exhibiting a...