Category: Other Topics
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Announcing the Inaugural CITP Technology Fellows Program
Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is launching a new Technology Fellows Program. This initiative is designed to connect technologists with government experience to create an expert network addressing the shortage of technical expertise in state and local regulatory bodies nationwide. The online application is now open. As governments increasingly confront complex challenges…
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Newly-Retired Andrew Appel Reflects on his Voting Machine Advocacy
by Yaakov Zinberg ‘23 During the first week of the 2009 spring semester, Andrew Appel ’81, Princeton’s Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science, made the short trip down Route 1 to Trenton’s Superior Court. He was asked to serve as an expert witness in a New Jersey trial in which the state was accused of…
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Meet the Researcher: Varun Rao
Varun Rao is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Rao recently sat down with Princeton undergraduate student Tsion Kergo ‘26 for an interview to discuss his research interests, academic background, and the importance of responsible technology in society. Their conversation has been edited…
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The Inception of CITP’s Digital Witness Lab – A Retrospective with Surya Mattu
By David M. Krakow The issue of data privacy is hardly new. The term “right to privacy” was used as far back as an 1890 Harvard Law Review article addressing the threat posed by photography and newspapers. Fast forward 135 years, and the threat is more complicated and widespread. It seems at times that one…
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We are releasing three longitudinal datasets of Yelp review recommendations with over 2.5M unique reviews.
By Ryan Amos, Roland Maio, and Prateek Mittal Online reviews are an important source of consumer information, play an important role in consumer protection, and have a substantial impact on businesses’ economic outcomes. Some of these reviews may be problematic; for example, incentivized reviews, reviews with a conflict of interest, irrelevant reviews, and entirely fabricated…
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Is This An Ad? Help Us Identify Misleading Content On YouTube
by Michael Swart, Arunesh Mathur, and Marshini Chetty Ever watched a video on YouTube and wondered if the YouTuber was paid for endorsing a product? You are not alone. In fact, Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut recently called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into deceptive practices where YouTubers do not disclose that they…
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ImageCast Evolution voting machine: Mitigations, misleadings, and misunderstandings
Two months ago I wrote that the New York State Board of Elections was going to request a reexamination of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine, in light of a design flaw that I had previously described. The Dominion ICE is an optical-scan voting machine. Most voters are expected to feed in a hand-marked optical…
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Voting machines I recommend
I’ve written several articles critical of specific voting machines, and you might wonder, are there any voting machines I like? For in-person voting (whether on election day or in early vote centers), I recommend Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines, with a ballot-marking device (BMD) available for those voters unable to mark a ballot by…
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Reexamination of an all-in-one voting machine
The co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections has formally requested that the Election Operations Unit of the State Board re-examine the State’s certification of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine. The Dominion ImageCast Evolution (also called Dominion ICE) is an “all-in-one” voting machine that combines in the same paper path an optical scanner…
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Princeton Students: Learn the Design & Ethics of Large-Scale Experimentation
Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences. These experiments are also powerful tools to monitor injustice and govern human and algorithm behavior. How can we do field experiments at scale, reliably,…