Vice: “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data,” Facebook engineers say in leaked document. Facebook is facing what it describes internally as a “tsunami” of privacy regulations all over the world, which will force the company to dramatically change how it deals with users’ personal… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
If You Want to Leave Twitter Because of Elon Musk, These Are Your Options
Vice Motherboard: “There isn’t a site that can replace Twitter that is exactly like Twitter, unfortunately. But there are a couple of different options for small-scale blogging, community, and interesting conversation, albeit with a slower pace of conversation than Twitter has…” Continue Reading
The Limitations of Privacy Rights
Solove, Daniel J., The Limitations of Privacy Rights (February 1, 2022). 98 Notre Dame Law Review — (Forthcoming 2023), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4024790 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4024790 “Individual privacy rights are often at the heart of information privacy and data protection laws. The most comprehensive set of rights, from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),… Continue Reading
This Pandemic Mapping Project Shows How Covid-19 Transformed Our Worlds
Scientific American – “Toward the end of 2020, I interviewed an archaeologist who—while locked out of her lab due to university health restrictions—was collecting photographs of Covid-19’s stamp on public spaces. Latex gloves and polypropylene masks, carelessly discarded in streets, parks, and gutters, featured prominently. She related a horrifying belief: Eventually, these non-decomposable medical accessories… Continue Reading
We’re Publishing the Facebook Papers. Here’s What They Say About Donald Trump, the 2020 Election, and Jan. 6.
“Gizmodo has reviewed, redacted, and published more than two dozen leaked Facebook documents, the first of hundreds to come. In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from… Continue Reading
Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
TechCrunch: “Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal information from… Continue Reading
Americans are drowning in spam
Axios: “You’re not imagining it: The flood of spam calls, texts, emails and social media posts into your life is getting a lot bigger. Why it matters: Junk messages aren’t just annoying — they also open the door to more fraud, cybercrime and identity theft than ever before. Driving the news: The average American received… Continue Reading
Propaganda, Mis- and Disinformation, and Censorship: The War for Hearts and Minds
how to save the world – Dave Pollard: “…But perhaps equally-important in this century are the non-military wars battling for the “hearts and minds” of citizens — fights over votes, seats, laws, ideologies and tax dollars rather than land. It is hard to deny, for example, that the US is engaged in a so-far-non-military civil… Continue Reading
Redditle.com
SK Lim: “I built redditle.com for those of us who append “reddit” to our Google searches. Reddit search isn’t great but it’s improving! In the meantime, some of us still use Google to search Reddit, hence https://redditle.com. Or for some of us, because Google’s results are increasingly filled with clickbait, “reddit” has been a cheatcode… Continue Reading
Librarians Can’t Be Neutral in the War on Information
Information Today / Dave Schumaker: “…Specialized librarians are an obvious example of librarians whose success depends on their not being neutral. Legal, medical, corporate, and other specialized librarians perform more in-depth research than librarians in other settings. They fulfill Ranganathan’s fourth law—“Save the time of the reader”—in a very direct way, by selecting, summarizing, and… Continue Reading
Open source intelligence combats disinformation on Russia’s war against Ukraine
PBS NewsHour: “It is often said that truth is the first casualty in any war. Propaganda, disinformation and outright lies have always been dependable tactics to win hearts and minds. But in a world more connected than ever by technology, it is more possible for anyone to root out information. It’s called open source intelligence,… Continue Reading
The Law of Social Roles for The Platform Internet
Mazzurco, Sari, The Law of Social Roles for The Platform Internet (February 21, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4040152 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4040152 “Social roles are integral to social life. Roles like teacher, judge, and employee help people navigate interactions by supplying them with meaning—specifically, societal expectations about actors’ appropriate behaviors in a particular relationship. In the emergent… Continue Reading
