By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Drexel University) and Ellen P. Goodman (Professor, Rutgers Law School) ProPublica’s story on “machine bias” in an algorithm used for sentencing defendants amplified calls to make algorithms more transparent and accountable. It has never been more clear that algorithms are political (Gillespie) and embody contested choices (Crawford), […]
Election security as a national security issue
August 3, 2016 by
We recently learned that Russian state actors may have been responsible for the DNC emails recently leaked to Wikileaks. Earlier this spring, once they became aware of the hack, the DNC hired Crowdstrike, an incident response firm. The New York Times reports: Preliminary conclusions were discussed last week at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. […]
Brexit Exposes Old and Deepening Data Divide between EU and UK
July 25, 2016 by
After the Brexit vote, politicians, businesses and citizens are all wondering what’s next. In general, legal uncertainty permeates Brexit, but in the world of bits and bytes, Brussels and London have in fact been on a collision course at least since the 90s. The new British prime minister, Theresa May, has been personally responsible for […]
Pokémon Go and The Law: Privacy, Intellectual Property, and Other Legal Concerns
July 19, 2016 by
Pokémon Go made 22-year-old Kyrie Tompkins fall and twist her ankle. “[The game] vibrated to let me know there was something nearby and I looked up and just fell in a hole,” she told local news outlet WHEC 10. So far, no one has sued Niantic or The Pokémon Company for injuries suffered while playing […]
A Peek at A/B Testing in the Wild
May 26, 2016 by
[Dillon Reisman was previously an undergraduate at Princeton when he worked on a neat study of the surveillance implications of cookies. Now he’s working with the WebTAP project again in a research + engineering role. — Arvind Narayanan] In 2014, Facebook revealed that they had manipulated users’ news feeds for the sake of a psychology study […]
