Slate

At Facebook, privacy is back -- not just as a social norm, but as a business model. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently singled out privacy features and private services like messaging and anonymous logins as keys to the company’s future growth.

Why? “Because,” he said, “at some level, there are only so many photos you’re going to want to share with all your friends.” He’s right.

[Commentary] Facebook’s methodology raises serious ethical questions. The team may have bent research standards too far, possibly overstepping criteria enshrined in federal law and human rights declarations.

“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. “This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.” Ah, informed consent.

Here is the only mention of “informed consent” in the paper: The research “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” That is not how most social scientists define informed consent.

There is a vague mention of “research” in the fine print that one agrees to by signing up for Facebook. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me, however, it is worth asking whether this lawyerly disclosure is really sufficient to warn people that “their Facebook accounts may be fair game for every social scientist on the planet.”

Facebook presumably receives no federal funding for such research, so the investigation might be exempt from the Common Rule.

Even if the study is legal, it appears to flout the ethical standards spelled out in instructions to scientists who wish to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments,” reads one requirement on the journal’s website.

Within the two very different Philadelphia communities of affluent Chestnut Hill and low-income Kensington, there are two places remarkably similar in the resources they provide: the local public libraries.

Each has been retooled with banks of new computers, the latest software and speedy Internet access.

Susan Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy education at NYU, and Donna Celano, an assistant professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent hundreds of hours in the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, watching how patrons used the books and computers on offer. The two were especially interested in how the introduction of computers might “level the playing field” for the neighborhoods’ young people, children of “concentrated affluence” and “concentrated poverty.”

They undertook their observations in a hopeful frame of mind: “Given the wizardry of these machines and their ability to support children’s self-teaching,” they wondered, “might we begin to see a closing of the opportunity gap?” Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically different outcome: “The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it,” they wrote in a 2012 book based on their Philadelphia library study. With the spread of educational technology, they predicted, “the not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.”

This is not a story of the familiar “digital divide”-- a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. This has to do, rather, with a phenomenon Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: Granted access to technology, affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select different programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience. The unleveling impact of technology also has to do with a phenomenon known as the “Matthew Effect”: the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time.

[Commentary] Way before Spotify, stereos, or even radio, Americans who wanted to listen to music at home had one choice: They could play it themselves. This changed by the 1890s, when a hot new technology arrived: the player piano.

Player pianos were miraculous in their ability to play popular songs and old standards alike while people sang along, danced, or just enjoyed the sounds. But as with a lot of newfangled machines, not everyone loved the player piano.

As we all know, the golden age of American songwriting did not end in 1908, when, in a case called White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co., the Supreme Court sided with the player piano companies.

Has the freedom to copy others’ songs, in exchange for a very low fee that the original songwriter has no power to override, suppressed the incentive to write new songs? There’s no evidence of that. Indeed, the opposite is true. Every day we see a continual outpouring of new songs.

[Raustiala is a professor at UCLA School of Law; Sprigman is a professor at the NYU School of Law]

[Commentary] Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, WordPress, and Facebook aren’t responsible for the copyright infringement of each of their millions of users, so long as they take down specific posts, videos, or images when notified by copyright holders.

But copyright holders thought that wasn’t good enough. They wanted to take down whole websites, not just particular posts, and without ever going to court.

In 2011, they proposed a bill that would let them do just that. It was called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Now the copyright lobbyists seem to be testing the waters again. Rather than introduce another bill, they are talking about “voluntary” commitments among copyright-holders and payment processors, advertisers, and others. The House Judiciary Committee, the folks in Congress who wrote SOPA, will hold a hearing about the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure, which is one of the cornerstones of digital copyright law -- and which SOPA would have gutted. But that’s not all. The US Patent and Trademark Office has scheduled a “multistakeholder forum” to discuss “improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system”: another chance to build some voluntary consensus. Copyright lobbyists just can’t get over the breakup; like an ex insistently trying to catch up with drinks, they want SOPA back. The clearest public indicator of Hollywood’s intentions, though, came through at one of the last House Judiciary Committee hearings, a few months ago. It was called “The Role of Voluntary Agreements in the US Intellectual Property System.”

[Marvin Ammori is a Future Tense fellow at New America]

[March 10]

[Commentary] The US data business is largely unregulated, which is not the case in most Western European countries. Those countries require all data collectors to provide individuals with access to their data; the ability to correct errors in the data; and, in some cases, the right to delete the data.

After reading the fine print on 212 websites, I learned that only 33 of them offered me a chance to see the data they held about me. But upon closer examination, not all of them were real offers. Some required me to set up accounts in order to see my data. I contacted 23 data brokers and received my data from 13 of them. Some asked me to send my requests by postal mail, along with a copy of my driver’s license. Others allowed email requests. Most of the responses I got were from the biggest players in the industry.

[Angwin is the author of Dragnet Nation and an investigative journalist for ProPublica]