Privacy Part 1: Corporate Data Gathering

April 1

A persistent fear throughout all of the Internet’s operation is the Internet’s treatment of a person’s own privacy. We have a hard time defining the term, much less determining what role it should play in deciding the whos, whats, and hows of Internet governance. Nevertheless, the Internet’s present evolution indicates that unless we spend time contemplating the reinforcing privacy online, our interests may fall to the interests of profitability, online behavior regulation, and cybersecurity.

Over the next two weeks we'll look at privacy, beginning with general concepts of privacy, how data is measured and gathered on the web, and some specific legal responses to privacy concerns. Next week we'll build on these concepts with an eye toward government surveillance and law enforcement.

Our own David O'Brien will be leading the class discussion this week.

Readings

Conceptualizing privacy

• Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy (Chapter 1)

Privacy and technology

• Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Chapter 9)

• Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits (Chapter 2) (read pages 36-42)

• Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (Chapter 7) (focus on "Privacy in Public: Data")

• Bruce Schneier, Why Anonymous Data Sometimes Isn't

• Play around with some of the websites by Latanya Sweeney

• The Data Map

• About My Ride

• About My Info

Privacy and law

• Wikipedia, Privacy Laws of the United States and Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

• danah boyd, Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule

Optional Readings

• Hal Roberts and John Palfrey, The EU Data Retention Directive in an Era of Internet Surveillance

• Solveig Singleton, Privacy as Censorship

• Dan Solove, The Future of Reputation (Chapter 7)

• Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, Robust De-anonymization of Large Datasets (How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset) (Arxiv)

• Noam Cohen, It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know It (New York Times)

• Bruce Schneier, Surveillance and the Internet of Things

Class Discussion

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