Information Policy: a primer

Reading list from a class at Cornell Tech

Published in

Cornell Tech

6 min readSep 22, 2016

This list of articles, papers, and videos comprises the required readings in Controversies in Connective Media: Ethics, Policy, and Law, a class taught in the Spring 2016 semester at Cornell Tech by @JorisVanHoboken, @s010n, and @_nomap.

These cover a wide range of topics related to information policy, privacy, and access and introduces controversies surrounding popular consumer services, platforms, and systems.

Intermediary Liability & Responsibility

The History of Twitter's Rules

"Because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited…

motherboard.vice.com

Hate Yik Yak And Anonymous Gossip Sites All You Want, But They Won't Go Away

Throughout 2014, students at Colgate University in central New York were outraged by a slew of racist comments. They…

www.huffingtonpost.com

U.S. Govt Reviews Impact and Efficacy of DMCA Safe Harbor - TorrentFreak

The U.S. Government has launched a public consultation to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMCA's Safe Harbor…

torrentfreak.com

The Government Wants To Know: What's Your Radicalism Score?

Last week, a bunch of important people from Washington, D.C. packed their bags and flew to California to meet with a…

fusion.net

Platforms & their Users: Identity, Community & Trust

The Laws of Identity

Kim Cameron Identity and Access Architect Microsoft Corporation May 2005 Applies to: Security Web development Web…

msdn.microsoft.com

Picture Your Name Here

SUNDAY afternoon used to mean lazing on the quad or sleeping off a hangover. No one could remember much about what…

www.nytimes.com

My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal

This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought…

time.com

Databite No. 63: Amanda Levendowski || Data & Society

Databite No. 63: Amanda Levendowski Amanda Levendowski (@levendowski) on crafting online Harassment and Abuse Reporting…

www.datasociety.net

" #9 The Writing on the Wall

Yik Yak is an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. At Colgate…

gimletmedia.com

" #46 Yik Yak Returns

Yik Yak is an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. In the first part…

gimletmedia.com

Business Models, Competition & Markets

The Internet's Original Sin

It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web. Please consider disabling it for our…

www.theatlantic.com

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle…

www.wired.com

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services - think apps - are less…

www.wired.com

In the Grip of the New Monopolists

How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple…

www.wsj.com

Tech's 'Frightful 5' Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future

It's not just because I'm a Tarantino fan. By just about every measure worth collecting, these five American consumer…

www.nytimes.com

Security

The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists

In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the…

www.theatlantic.com

Everything Is Broken

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a…

medium.com

How Laws Are Determining the Ethics of Code

In late July 2014, the information security world was on edge. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University-who work…

www.slate.com

Labour in the digital economy

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services…

www.wired.com

The Ladies Vanish

Andrew Norman Wilson was fired from his contracting job at Google for interacting with what he called a different…

thenewinquiry.com

Regulating the Sharing Economy

Are the growing number of apps and online services that give consumers more direct control cutting-edge conveniences…

www.nytimes.com

Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy

The backlash against unethical labor practices in the “collaborative sharing economy” has been overplayed.

medium.com

Algorithmic Intermediaries

Can an Algorithm be Wrong?

How do we know if we are where it's at? Tarleton Gillespie explores the controversy over Twitter Trends and the…

limn.it

The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That's Changing the Rules of Business

Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie. It was November 2007 and Barack…

www.wired.com

We Experiment On Human Beings!

I'm the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah…

blog.okcupid.com

Free Speech

Original sin

In April 1994, two immigration lawyers from Phoenix ruined the Internet. The US government had announced a Green Card…

www.cjr.org

How net neutrality violates the First Amendment (according to one ISP)

Major Internet service providers have seemingly given up on the argument that net neutrality rules violate their First…

arstechnica.com

Privacy

Unpacking "privacy" for a networked world

Edit description

dl.acm.org

Privacy Pragmatism

Ever since the Internet became a mass social phenomenon in the 1990s, people have worried about its effects on their…

www.foreignaffairs.com

Creation & Innovation

The patent mess video

We're digging into the patent quagmire this week, with CNET's Molly Wood and special guest Nilay Patel of Engadget. Are…

www.cnet.com

If Only Pageviews Were Dollars

My first online article went viral! It wasn't quite as contagious as the video of little Charlie, who's been seen…

www.publishersweekly.com

With the biggest publishers in the country on board, we’re launching our journalistic startup in…

Today, I sent this to the first beta users that signed-up to Blendle, my journalism startup backed by The New York…

medium.com

Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

How many people does it take to fix a tractor? A year ago, I would have said it took just one person. One person with a…

www.slate.com

Internet Governance & Architecture

What the Net Neutrality Rules Say

Two weeks after voting to regulate broadband Internet service as a public utility, the Federal Communications…

www.nytimes.com

Politics Imperil the Bold Plan to Wrest the Internet From US Control

No one owns the Internet. It's an international network under the control of no single country or company. But actually…

www.wired.com

International Dimensions

Here's how Washington weaponized America's IT companies and why it backfired

Two months ago, the European Court of Justice issued a ruling that effectively invalidated the Safe Harbor arrangement…

www.washingtonpost.com

The End of the Internet?

How regional networks may replace the World Wide Web

www.theatlantic.com

A manifesto for the future of the 'right to be forgotten' debate

For more than two months now, the inaptly-named "right to be forgotten" has remained buoyant in the news cycle. The…

www.theguardian.com

Mobile data sharing in emergencies - consent, care and control

The Centre for Internet and Society recently released a groundbreaking paper on the practical, legal and ethical…

linnettaylor.wordpress.com

Internet of Things

Regulating the Internet of Things: First Steps Toward Managing Discrimination, Privacy, Security…

Electronic sensors are now ubiquitous in our smartphones, cars, homes, electric systems, health-care devices, fitness…

www.texaslrev.com

What Google can really do with Nest, or really, Nest's data

Google's acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion this week has been heralded as the company's big move into home…

arstechnica.com

When Fitbit Is the Expert Witness

An upcoming court case will use fitness-tracking data to try and prove a plaintiff's claim, bringing us one step closer…

www.theatlantic.com

Is Smart Making Us Dumb?

Would you like all of your Facebook friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany…

www.wsj.com

Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car

The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old's asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in…

dealbook.nytimes.com

Zero Rating Services

Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism

Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So…

motherboard.vice.com

Free Basics by Facebook

Free Basics by Facebook provides people with access to useful services on their mobile phones in markets where internet…

info.internet.org

Following Zuckerberg's visit last October, Internet.org launches today in Indonesia

(Updated at 16:35: Tech in Asia just received the news that online marketplace Tokopedia and e-learning platform Kelase…

www.techinasia.com

Indonesian telco explains why it ditched Zuckerberg's Internet.org

Internet.org, the app initiated by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg that allows people to access certain online content for…

www.techinasia.com

India's ban on Facebook's free service is an overreaction

What constitutes digital equality? India's national telecoms regulator thinks it knows, its national consultation on…

www.theguardian.com

Facebook, Google and the race to sign up India - FT.com

With a tentative wobble, a young woman in a sari is trying out her new bicycle for the first time, cycling around a…

next.ft.com