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Brennan Center for Social Justice: How the Government Is Collecting and Using Your Location Data “Cell phones are ubiquitous. As of 2017, there were more cell phones than people in the United States. Nearly 70 percent of those were smartphones, with 94 percent of millennials carrying a smart device. Cell phones go nearly everywhere, and …
WASHINGTON (AP) — The District of Columbia has fired the latest legal salvo against Facebook with a lawsuit seeking to punish the social networking company for allowing data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly access data from as many as 87 million users . “The complaint filed Wednesday by Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine alleges …
Wired: “Every January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a personal challenge he will undertake in the year ahead. In 2016, he committed to running 365 miles before the year was up. In 2017, he milked cows and rode tractors as part of his resolution to meet more people outside the Silicon Valley bubble. Last January, …
“Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press, for which he was the director from 2005 until his retirement in 2017, and currently sits as the Fox Family Pavilion …
engadget: “The US government isn’t done taking action against Russians accused of hacking and interference campaigns. The Treasury Department has leveled sanctions against 16 current and former GRU intelligence officers (some of whom were targeted in earlier indictments) for their involvement in multiple campaigns against the US, including the Democratic National Committee hacks, World Anti-Doping …
The New York Times: “For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained …
Business Insider: The Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, called out shoppers for “showrooming” in a viral tweet. It said that customers have been coming in and taking pictures of books, then buying them on Amazon. It said some are even bragging about doing it. Showrooming is still a problem for small, independent retailers without an …
The New York Times: “Insults since Mr. Trump became president are highlighted in yellow; the most recent updates are shaded purple. (This list covers tweets since Mr. Trump declared his candidacy.)”
“This essay argues that “data ownership” is a flawed, counterproductive way of thinking about data. It not only does not fix existing problems; it creates new ones. Instead, we need a framework that gives people rights to stipulate how their data is used without requiring them to take ownership of it themselves. The Data Care Act, a bill introduced …
The Computational Propaganda Project – Algorithms, Automation and Digital Politics. Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, Dimitra Liotsiou, John Kelly & Camille François, “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018.” Working Paper 2018.2. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk. 46 pp. “Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack …
New Knowledge: “For years, Russia has leveraged social media to wage a propaganda war with operations that initially targeted their own citizens and sphere of influence. In 2014, they broadened those operations to include the United States and ran a multi-year campaign to manipulate and influence Americans, exploiting social and political divisions. The scale was …
Wired: “…After three weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back bombshells by federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s increasingly clear that as 2018 winds down, Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president—a total of at least 17 distinct court cases stemming from at least seven different sets of prosecutors and investigators. …
