Year: 2021
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Facebook’s Illusory Promise of Transparency
By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Ashley Gorham, Eli Lucherini, Mihir Kshirsagar, and Arvind Narayanan. Facebook’s latest move to obstruct academic research about its platform by disabling NYU’s Ad Observatory is deeply troubling. While Facebook claims to offer researchers access to its FORT Researcher Platform as an alternative, that is an illusory offer as we have recently learned…
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Studying the societal impact of recommender systems using simulation
By Eli Lucherini, Matthew Sun, Amy Winecoff, and Arvind Narayanan. For those interested in the impact of recommender systems on society, we are happy to share several new pieces: a software tool for studying this interface via simulation the accompanying paper a short piece on methodological concerns in simulation research a talk offering a critical…
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Warnings That Work: Combating Misinformation Without Deplatforming
Ben Kaiser, Jonathan Mayer, and J. Nathan Matias This post originally appeared on Lawfare. “They’re killing people.” President Biden lambasted Facebook last week for allowing vaccine misinformation to proliferate on its platform. Facebook issued a sharp rejoinder, highlighting the many steps it has taken to promote accurate public health information and expressing angst about government censorship.…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 2
In my previous post I explained the preliminary conclusions from the three experts engaged by New Hampshire to examine an election anomaly in the town of Windham, November 2020. Improperly folded ballots (which shouldn’t have happened) had folds that were interpreted as votes (which also shouldn’t have happened) and this wasn’t noticed by any routine…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 1
Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of optical-scan voting machines (possibly over several years of use) can cause paper-fold lines in absentee ballots to be interpreted as votes. In a local…
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Accommodating voters with disabilities
Citizens with disabilities have as much right to vote as anyone else, and our election systems should fully accommodate them. In recent years some advocates have claimed that electronic ballot return, in other words internet voting, is needed to accommodate voters with disabilities. But internet voting is dangerously insecure–in the context of U.S. public elections…
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Phone number recycling creates serious security and privacy risks to millions of people
By Kevin Lee and Arvind Narayanan 35 million phone numbers are disconnected every year in the U.S., according to the Federal Communications Commission. Most of these numbers are not disconnected forever; after a while, carriers reassign them to new subscribers. Through the years, these new subscribers have sometimes reported receiving calls and messages meant for…
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Internet Voting is Still Inherently Insecure
Legislation for voting by internet is pending in Colorado, and other states have been on the verge of permitting ballots to be returned by internet. But voting by internet is too insecure, too hackable, to use in U.S. elections. Every scientific study comes to the same conclusion—the Defense Department’s study group in 2004, the National…
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Juan Gilbert’s Transparent BMD
Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy recently hosted a talk by Professor Juan Gilbert of the University of Florida, in which he demonstrated his interesting new invention and presented results from user studies. What’s the problem with ballot-marking devices? It’s well known that a voting system must use paper ballots to be trustworthy (at least…
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Expert analysis of Antrim County, Michigan
Preliminary unofficial election results posted at 4am after the November 3rd 2020 election, by election administrators in Antrim County Michigan, were incorrect by thousands of votes–in the Presidential race and in local races. Within days, Antrim County election administrators corrected the error, as confirmed by a full hand recount of the ballots, but everyone wondered:…