December 25, 2024

Archives for 2018

Oblivious DNS: Plugging the Internet’s Biggest Privacy Hole

by Annie Edmundson, Paul Schmitt, Nick Feamster The recent news that Cloudflare is deploying their own DNS recursive resolver has once again raised hopes that users will enjoy improved privacy, since they can send DNS traffic encrypted to Cloudflare, rather than to their ISP. In this post, we explain why this approach only moves your private […]

Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough

Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging […]

When The Choice Is To Delete Facebook Or Buy A Loaf Of Bread

By Julieanne Romanosky and Marshini Chetty In the last week, there has been a growing debate around Facebook and privacy. On Twitter, the newly formed #deletefacebook movement calls for users who are upset over the data breach of over 50 million Facebook accounts by Cambridge Analytica to rid themselves of the platform altogether. But like […]

Is affiliate marketing disclosed to consumers on social media?

By Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan and Marshini Chetty YouTube has millions of videos similar in spirit to this one: The video reviews Blue Apron—an online grocery service—describing how it is efficient and cheaper than buying groceries at the store. The description of the video has a link to Blue Apron which gets you a $30 […]

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Online Content Moderation

Yesterday in Berlin, I attended a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online, hosted by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Context In the United States and Europe, many platforms that host user content, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, have enjoyed safe harbor protections for the content they host, […]