The Record

Forgetful Advertising: Imagining a More Responsible Digital Ad System

As Silicon Valley giants sketch their preferred future for digital advertising, an infrastructure with significant implications for life online and offline, there are startlingly few alternatives to their vision. In response, we propose “forgetful advertising”, a vision for responsible digital advertising structured around a single design choice: avoiding the storage of behavioral data.

Section 230 and the International Law of Facebook

Despite its local origins, Section 230 serves as a key architectural norm of the global internet: internet service providers are not typically responsible for the speech of their users. Section 230 underpins what we might describe as the International Law of Facebook— the global community guidelines written and enforced by internet platforms, largely allowing these platforms to regulate the speech on their platforms. Reviewing Section 230 cases involving foreign events, foreign parties, or foreign law, the essay reveals how Section 230 made the U.S.

Sonic Privacy

Advances in data collection and processing have facilitated ultra- and infra-sonic machine-listening and learning. This requires the recognition of sonic privacy, protection for our “sonic data:” those representations or observations that define the characteristics of sound and its cognitive and emotive forces. This right would protect (non)participation in the public sphere.

Seeing Like an Algorithmic Error: What are Algorithmic Mistakes, Why Do They Matter, How Might They Be Public Problems?

Algorithmic “mistakes” are windows into the social and technological forces that create computational systems. They reveal the assumptions that drive system designers, the power that some people have to define success and call out errors, and how far institutions are willing to go to fix failures. Using a recent case of facial detection and remote proctoring, I suggest “seeing like an algorithmic error” as a way to turn seemingly simple quirks and individually felt glitches into shared social consequences that shape social life— that is, into public problems.

If Research Agenda Were Honest

Aspiring scholars are often asked: What is your research agenda? If my research agenda were honest, my response would unapologetically be that I have no research agenda and that I, like Toni Morrison and possibly many others, mostly write about what I want to read but have yet to be written. As one’s own ideas, especially on perspective and whole view, change as she gains experience, her writings after all become just little fragments of her fleece left upon the hedges of life.