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.
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Several recent news stories have highlighted the ways that online social platforms can subtly shape our lives. First came the news that Facebook has “manipulated” users’ emotions by tweaking the…
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A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications
“A Scanner Darkly”, a dystopian 1977 Philip K. Dick novel (adapted to a 2006 film), describes a society with pervasive audio and video surveillance. Our paper “A Scanner Darkly”, which appeared in last year’s…
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"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response
CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic…
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Fair Use, Legal Databases, and Access to Litigation Inputs
In copyright-and-fair-use news, a significant case for the legal profession’s access to the inputs of judicial decision-making was decided last week in federal district court in New York. The case was…
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No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn't work
Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical…
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice…
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After the Facebook emotional contagion experiment: A proposal for a positive path forward
Now that some of the furor over the Facebook emotional contagion experiment has passed, it is time for us to decide what should happen next. The public backlash has the…
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"Privacy Comes at a Cost" – The U.S. Supreme Court’s Opinion in Riley v. California
In Riley v. California, a cell phone search-and-seizure opinion delivered by Chief Justice Roberts for a unanimous Court last month, the U.S. Supreme Court squarely recognized, and afforded special protection…
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Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’…