March 19, 2024

Archives for October 2016

The Effects of the Forthcoming FCC Privacy Rules on Internet Security

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced new privacy rules that govern how Internet service providers can share information about consumers with third parties.  One focus of this rulemaking has been on the use and sharing of so-called “Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)”—information about subscribers—for advertising. The Center for Information Technology Policy and the Center […]

Learning Privacy Expectations by Crowdsourcing Contextual Informational Norms

[This post reports on joint work with Schrasing Tong, Thomas Wies (NYU), Paula Kift (NYU), Helen Nissenbaum (NYU), Lakshminarayanan Subramanian (NYU), Prateek Mittal (Princeton) — Yan] To appear in the proceedings of the Fourth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2016) We would like to thank Joanna Huey for helpful comments and feedback. Motivation […]

Sign up now for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency

I’m excited to announce that registration for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency is now open. The workshop will take place at NYU on Nov 19. It convenes an emerging interdisciplinary community that seeks transparency and oversight of data-driven algorithmic systems through empirical research. Despite the short notice of the workshop’s announcement (about […]

The AT&T Deal Is About the Data

Most of the mainstream media coverage of the proposed AT&T acquisition of Time Warner has missed an important risk. Much of the discussion has focused on the potential market power the combined entity would have to raise prices, limit choice or otherwise disadvantage consumers. A primary motivation for the deal, however, as readers of Freedom […]

Neophilia and Human Nature

In the spring of 2012, I attended the memorial service for John McCarthy, a computer science founding father, at an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Among the great and good anecdotes told about this great and good guy was the mention of how McCarthy, more or less in around 1961, invented time-sharing—which, as was pointed […]