December 9, 2022

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Archives for June 2014

Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide

June 30, 2014 by

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’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

The main dispute seems to be between people such as James Grimmelmann and Zeynep Tufecki who see this as a clear violation of research ethics; versus people such as Tal Yarkoni who see it as consistent with ordinary practices for a big online company like Facebook.

One explanation for the controversy is the large gap between the ethical standards of industry practice, versus the research community’s ethical standards for human subjects studies.
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On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books

June 19, 2014 by

In a new paper to be presented next week at WEIS by Jeremy Clark, we discuss the challenges in designing truly decentralized prediction markets and order books. Prediction markets allow market participants to trade shares in future events (such as “Will the USA advance to the knockout stage of the 2014 World Cup?”) and turn a profit from accurate predictions. Prediction markets have undergone extensive study by economists and have significant social value by providing accurate forecasts of future events.

Prediction markets have been traditionally run by centralized entities that holds all of their users’ funds and shares in escrow, don’t generally allow trades to be routed through different exchange services, and make many important decisions: which events to open a market for, what the correct outcome is, and how to match buyers with sellers. Our work examines the extent to which these tasks can be decentralized to reduce trust in single entities and increase transparency, fault-tolerance, and flexibility. Bitcoin’s success as a decentralized ledger of financial transactions suggests a decentralized prediction market may be within reach. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cryptocurrencies Tagged With: ,

Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions

June 18, 2014 by

[Nicky Robinson is an undergraduate whose Junior Independent Work project, advised by Joseph Bonneau, turned into a neat research paper. — Arvind Narayanan]

When you use the Facebook Connect [1] login system, another website may ask for permission to “post to Facebook for you.” But what does this message mean? If you click “Okay”, what can the site do to your profile?

Motivated by this confusion, we explored Facebook Connect login permissions with the twin goals of understanding what permissions websites are given when a user logs in with Facebook and whether users understand that they are authorizing those permissions. Here is a working draft of our research report.
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Filed Under: Privacy & Security Tagged With: , ,

Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool

June 16, 2014 by

The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action of a large community. The worry now is that GHash has too much power and that this could destabilize the Bitcoin system. Today I want to explain what has happened, why it provokes worry, and how I see the situation.
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Filed Under: Cryptocurrencies Tagged With: , ,

Encryption as protest

June 10, 2014 by

As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used to. In computer science, PETs are used for protecting anonymity or confidentiality, often via application of cryptography, and are intended to be bullet-proof against an adversary who is trying to breach privacy.

By contrast, Helen Nissenbaum and others have developed a political and ethical theory of obfuscation [1], “a strategy for individuals, groups or communities to hide; to protect themselves; to protest or enact civil disobedience, especially in the context of monitoring, aggregated analysis, and profiling..”  CV Dazzle and Ad Nauseam are good examples.

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Filed Under: Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,