By Yash Parikh and Mihir Kshirsagar While some states like Montana are trying to ban data collection by TikTok, other states like Missouri are actively – and perhaps, unknowingly – sending their citizen’s data to TikTok. Yash Parikh, a Princeton computer science student, conducted research that reveals that at least one Missouri government website – covidvaccine.mo.gov […]
Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?
March 8, 2023 by
Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things. One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” Based in part on this kind of […]
Unrecoverable Election Screwup in Williamson County TX
February 16, 2023 by
In the November 2020 election in Williamson County, Texas, flawed e-pollbook software resulted in voters inadvertently voting for candidates and questions not from their own districts but from others in the same county. These voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote for candidates they were entitled to vote for—and their votes were wrongly counted […]
CITP Tech Clinic Files Amicus Brief In Gonzalez v. Google Case
December 19, 2022 by
By Nia Brazzell and Mihir Kshirsagar In Gonzalez v. Google, a case under review at the Supreme Court, the families of individuals killed by ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris allege that YouTube aided and abetted terrorist strikes by radicalizing recruits through personalized recommendations of videos. CITP’s Tech Policy Clinic filed its first amicus brief before […]
Why the voting machines failed in Mercer County
December 1, 2022 by
On Election Day, November 8, 2022, every voting machine in every polling place in Mercer County, New Jersey failed to work. Voters in each precinct filled in the ovals in their preprinted optical-scan paper ballots, but the voting machines couldn’t read them. So voters were instructed to put their ballots into “slot 3” of the […]
