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 it way succumb 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.

Readings

Conceptualizing privacy

• Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy (Chapter 1)

• 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) (focus on pages 36-42: “Why We Lost Our Privacy, Or Gave it All Away”)

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

• Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (Chapter 7) (read “Solutions” through “Rules to Enable Choice About Privacy”)

• Johannes Köppel, The International Dimension of the SWIFT Affair

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)

• Chris Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight

• 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)

Class Discussion

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