Ernie Smith

There are things that the FCC is doing beyond ruining your internet that are worth discussing. One of those things is the recent passage of a measure to allow the voluntary rollout of ATSC 3.0, a television transmission standard that could bring both higher-resolution broadcasts and more interactivity to the boob tube.  In many ways, this is as big a deal as net neutrality, because the shift is so dramatic—in many ways for good, in other ways that we should discuss before we buy in.

As the Evernote saga recently showed, there are quite a few reasons for a privacy policy to exist, and one of those is that it helps the public know when the apps they use are breaking the contract between the company and the end user. But what if that contract just wasn’t there at all? Turns out that this is a more common situation than you’d think, in part due to lax detection and oversight.

In Nov, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cranked up this discussion by analyzing 18,000 Android apps in Google’s Play store. Roughly half of the apps studied didn’t have privacy policies at all, despite the fact that more than two thirds of apps (71 percent) used some form of personally identifiable information on the part of the user.

Let’s ponder the impact that technology had on the 1992 campaign.

1. Prodigy, the early online service that directly competed with AOL for a time, launched a 1992 campaign database for users to track candidates.
2. For his 1992 primary campaign, current Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) innovated by using a 1-800 number to solicit donations.
3. Gov Brown also used Compuserve to reach voters
4. The 1992 campaign was a hot topic on Usenet, the decentralized newsgroup system which is best described to those who never experienced it in person as the Reddit of its day.
5. In 1992, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ran a number of email-driven bots on the campaign92.org domain, allowing users to request position papers for any campaign on the ballot in at least half of US states.