CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
-
Digital technology mediates our public and private lives. That makes computer science a powerful discipline, but it also means that ethical considerations are essential in the development of these technologies.…
-
Design Ethics for Gender-Based Violence and Safety Technologies
Authored (and organized) by Kate Sim and Ben Zevenbergen. Digital technologies are increasingly proposed as innovative solution to the problems and threats faced by vulnerable groups such as children, women,…
-
LinkedIn reveals your personal email to your connections
[Huge thanks to Dillon Reisman, Arvind Narayanan, and Joanna Huey for providing great feedback on early drafts.] LinkedIn makes the primary email address associated with an account visible to all direct connections, as…
-
On Encryption, Archiving, and Accountability
“As Elites Switch to Texting, Watchdogs Fear Loss of Accountability“, says a headline in today’s New York Times. The story describes a rising concern among rule enforcers and compliance officers:…
-
European authorities fine Google for search tactics
This week the European Commission (EC) announced that it is fining Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive tactics in the company’s iconic search product. In this post I’ll unpack what’s going…
-
Killing car privacy by federal mandate
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing a requirement that every car should broadcast a cleartext message specifying its exact position, speed, and heading ten times per…
-
Lessons of 2016 for U.S. Election Security
The 2016 election was one of the most eventful in U.S. history. We will be debating its consequences for a long time. For those of us who pay attention to…
-
Web Census Notebook: A new tool for studying web privacy
As part of the Web Transparency and Accountability Project, we’ve been visiting the web’s top 1 million sites every month using our open-source privacy measurement tool OpenWPM. This has led…
-
Breaking, fixing, and extending zero-knowledge contingent payments
The problem of fair exchange arises often in business transactions — especially when those transactions are conducted anonymously over the internet. Alice would like to buy a widget from Bob,…
-
What does it mean to ask for an “explainable” algorithm?
One of the standard critiques of using algorithms for decision-making about people, and especially for consequential decisions about access to housing, credit, education, and so on, is that the algorithms…