EFF: “Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Corporate databases are vast, interconnected, and opaque. The movement and use of our data is difficult to understand, let alone trace. Yet companies use it to reach inferences about us, leading to lost employment, credit, and other opportunities. One unifying thread to this pervasive system is the collection of personal information from marginalized communities, and the subsequent discriminatory use by corporations and government agencies—exacerbating existing structural inequalities across society. Data surveillance is a civil rights problem, and legislation to protect data privacy can help protect civil rights…”
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Category Archives: Digital Rights
Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence
Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing. May 15, 20223 – Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence – Hearing video Witnesses – Samuel Altman, CEO OpenAI San Francisco, CA – Download Testimony: “…OpenAI is a leading developer of large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools. Fundamentally, the current generation of AI models are large-scale statistical prediction… Continue Reading
Big Tech Lobbyists Explain How They Took Over Washington
reThink Trade: “An amazing research paper unearths how the tech industry invented the concept of digital trade and sold it to government officials. Progressive trade advocates continue to express confusion over the Biden administration’s trade policies. Despite a U.S. trade representative (USTR) in Katherine Tai who has prioritized a worker-centered trade vision that breaks with… Continue Reading
ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names
FreeSpeech.com: “ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published “Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET”, which is now open for public comment. Either by design,… Continue Reading
Digital Privacy Legislation is Civil Rights Legislation
EFF: “As Congress ponders legislation to reform “big tech,” it must view comprehensive digital privacy legislation as desperately needed civil rights legislation, because data abuses often disproportionately harm communities already bearing the brunt of other inequalities. Harvesting and monetizing personal data whenever anyone uses social media or even vital online services has become ubiquitous, yet… Continue Reading
The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries
The Atlantic – Knowledge is too precious to be abandoned to the whims of the profit motive. “By collecting and digitizing such a huge collection of works and lending them out online, the Internet Archive is making an incredible social contribution. The way the nonprofit manages that archive, however, has earned the wrath of book… Continue Reading
It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it
The New York Times: “Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as… Continue Reading
Audiobooks Without Audible: The Hard Lessons I’ve Learned Routing Around Amazon
Publishers Weekly: “With a Kickstarter campaign now underway for the audio edition of his new book, ‘Red Team Blues,’ Cory Doctorow shares the mistakes of his past campaigns—and why it’s all worth it. My next novel is Red Team Blues. It’s a major title for my publisher, Tor (which is part of Macmillan), and the… Continue Reading
Digital Identity During Times of Crisis
“The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society hosted a 10-week Research Sprint from October to December 2022 investigating Digital Identity in Times of Crisis, in collaboration with partners metaLAB at Harvard, the Edgelands Institute, and Access Now. BKC Research Sprints are an educational format developed at the Center that connects early-career scholars and practitioners… Continue Reading
Book Publishers Won’t Stop Until Libraries Are Dead
TechDirt: “Earlier this week there was finally a hearing in the case brought by the big book publishers to kill off libraries. That, of course, is not how the publishers describe the lawsuit, but it’s absolutely what the lawsuit is about. We’ll get to some of the details in a moment, but we’ve joked in… Continue Reading
Internet Archives – Here’s how to participate in Monday’s oral arguments
“We’re standing up for the digital rights of all libraries in court! On Monday at 1pm ET, the Southern District of New York will hear oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the lawsuit against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending, brought by 4 of the world’s largest publishers. Here’s… Continue Reading
Why Vermont State’s digital library idea is so controversial
Higher Ed Dive: “…Vermont State University — a new institution to be formed from three existing Vermont public colleges — has announced that it will be transforming its libraries to be “all-digital. Alhough the physical spaces will continue to serve students, administrators said print materials will no longer be procured for students who do not… Continue Reading
