iSchool Podcast

NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum gave a lecture entitled, “Privacy in Context” at the School of Information yesterday as the last Distinguished Lecture of the semester. You can find audio of her talk here and photos here.

Abstract

Contemporary practices of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating personal information have placed impossible demands on the concept of privacy. The weight of these demands, in turn, is reflected in norms, laws, policies, and technical requirements that frequently seem to miss the mark, failing to negotiate a reasonable course between unbridled opportunism, on the one hand, and suspicious intransigence, on the other. This talk will present key elements in the theory of contextual integrity, which builds upon structural aspects of social life to enrich our understanding of privacy and its importance as a moral and political value. Allowing context-relative social norms and context-based social values into the scope of analysis enables nuance and subtle discrimination, often missing in other dominant approaches, in modeling and theorizing privacy as well as adjudicating and justifying particular privacy claims.

Bio

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where she is also a Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have supported her research on privacy, trust online, security, intellectual property, and several projects investigating moral and political values embodied in computer and information systems, notably, search engines, video games, and facial recognition systems. She has produced three books, Emotion and Focus, Computers, Ethics and Social Values (co-edited with D.J. Johnson), and Academy and the Internet (co-edited with Monroe Prince), and co-founded the journal Ethics and Information Technology. Before joining the faculty at NYU, Nissenbaum served as Associate Director of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. She earned a B.A. (Honors) from the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

Today, the UC Berkeley School of Information hosted, as part of its distinguished lecture series, a debate between Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, moderated by Geoff Nunberg (the event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library).

The turnout was spectacular and the debate lively. Here is the audio of the debate (48MB mp3) and here are a number of photos.

(below is the abstract and bios from the lecture announcement)

Is the Web a Threat to Our Culture?

Abstract: When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what’s significant, what’s trivial, and what’s irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.”

Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate.

Bios

Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley author, broadcaster and entrepreneur whose provocative book Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture was recently acclaimed by The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani as “shrewdly argued” and written “with acuity and passion”. Andrew is a prominent media personality who has appeared on the “Colbert Report”, “McNeil-Lehrer Newsnight” show, “The Today Show”, “Fox News”, “CNN International”, “NPR’s Weekend Edition”, “BBC Newsnight” and many other television and radio shows in America and overseas. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly and has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, The New York Times, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Wired, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Independent and MSNBC. Andrew is also a pioneering Silicon Valley media entrepreneur, having founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a well known first generation Internet music company. Educated at the universities of London and California, Andrew now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two children.

Paul Duguid is an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information; a professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; and an honorary fellow of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development at Lancaster University School of Management. At Berkeley, he co-teaches the “Quality of Information” and the “History of Information”, and his current research interests include the history and development of trademarks and a three-year archival research project funded by the ESRC of the UK and administered through Queen Mary, University of London. Throughout the 1990’s, he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and his book The Social Life of Information, co-written with John Seely Brown, is a reflection on the digital bombast of that era.

Geoffrey Nunberg (moderator) is an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information; a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University; and a consulting professor in the Stanford Department of Linguistics. He serves as chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, contributes a feature on language on the NPR show “Fresh Air”, and has written numerous commentaries on language for the Sunday New York Times Week in Review and other periodicals. His linguistics research includes work in semantics, pragmatics, text classification, and written-language structure; he also studies the social and cultural implications of digital technologies.

Julie Cohen came and gave a talk at the UC Berkeley School of Information on February 15, 2008. Audio of her lecture is available here:

MP3 link

Julie E. Cohen is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law
Center.

She teaches and writes about intellectual property law and privacy law, with
particular focus on copyright and on the intersection of copyright and
privacy rights in the networked information society. She is a co-author
of Copyright in a Global Information Economy (Aspen Law & Business, 2d
ed. 2006), and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center and Public Knowledge. From 1995 to 1999,
Professor Cohen taught at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
From 1992 to 1995, she practiced with the San Francisco firm of
McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, where she specialized in intellectual
property litigation. Professor Cohen received her A.B. from Harvard
University and her J.D. from the Harvard Law School, where she was a
Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She is a former law clerk
to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit.

Abstract

Rethinking Unauthorized Access
In recent years, the law has been asked to respond to a variety of
disputes involving the accessibility of information and related
standards and practices. These disputes cover the waterfront from the
design of proprietary media players to network neutrality to privacy
protection for search queries. So far, the law has been unable to
generate compelling discourses and principles for evaluating them. This
chapter will offer another way of thinking about issues of accessibility
and unauthorized access. I begin by exploring some of the situations in
which the legal rhetorics of innovation, competition, trespass, and
freedom of speech have failed to generate sustainable solutions to
problems of unauthorized access. Next, I consider some alternate ways of
conceptualizing the manner in which networked information technologies
create, disrupt, and “regulate” geographies of accessibility and
inaccessibility. The reference point for this exercise is not
innovation, competition or expressive freedom, but rather what I will
call the “informatics of everyday practice,” a term intended to
encompass all of the ways in which situated, embodied users experience
and interact with networked information technologies and the purposes
for which they do so. Finally, I consider some lessons for law and
policy. First, attention to the informatics of everyday practice
suggests that the law should shelter hacking and tinkering in many
instances, and explains why those activities are valuable both
intrinsically and instrumentally. But altering the law to privilege
technical self-help is not a panacea. I will argue that the law also
should pay closer attention to the design of network standards and
related “expert” processes.

Deirdre Mulligan came to South Hall and spoke to the UC Berkeley School of Information on February 13, 2008. The audio for her talk is available here:

MP3 Link

Bio

Deirdre K. Mulligan is the director of the Samuelson Law, Technology &
Public Policy Clinic and a clinical professor of law at the UC
Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Before coming to Boalt, she was
staff counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington.
Through the clinic, Mulligan and her students foster the public’s
interest in new computer and communication technology by engaging in
client advocacy and interdisciplinary research, and by participating
in developing technical standards and protocols. The clinic’s work has
advanced and protected the public’s interest in free expression,
individual privacy, balanced intellectual property rules, and secure,
reliable, open communication networks.
Mulligan writes about the risks and opportunities technology presents
to privacy, free expression, and access and use of information goods.
Recent publications about privacy include: “Storing Our Lives Online:
Expanded Email Storage Raises Complex Policy Issues,” with Ari
Schwartz and Indrani Mondal, forthcoming 2005, I/S: A Journal of Law
and Policy for the Information Society; and, “Reasonable Expectations
in Electronic Communications: A Critical Perspective on the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act,” 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1557 (2004).
Mulligan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on
Authentication Technology and Its Privacy Implications; the Federal
Trade Commission’s Federal Advisory Committee on Online Access and
Security, and the National Task Force on Privacy, Technology, and
Criminal Justice Information. She was a vice-chair of the California
Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices and chaired the
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) Conference in 2004. She is
currently a member of the California Office of Privacy Protection’s
Advisory Council and a co-chair of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing
Academic Advisory Board. She serves on the board of the California
Voter Foundation and on the advisory board of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.

Abstract

The California Security Breach Information Act (AB 700/SB 1386) has
been adopted, with modest modifications, by 39 additional states and
the District of Columbia. This law encourages firms to adopt sounder
security investments by requiring them to notify individuals of
security breaches of their personal information.

The use of compulsory information disclosures as a regulatory tool is
an important, modern, development in American law. The Toxics Release
Inventory (TRI), a publicly available EPA database that contains
information on toxic chemical releases and other waste management
activities, established under the Emergency Planning and Community
Right-to-Know Act of 1986 (EPCRA) is credited with providing
incentives for reductions and better management of toxic chemicals by
firms eager to avoid reporting releases and with providing information
essential to citizen and government oversight, engagement and action.
The California Security Breach Information Act was modeled on the TPRI.

Based on research documenting how the specific aspects of the
EPCRA—including standardized, centralized and electronic reporting and
public accessibility of data—the reported incidents, and the
non-profit community contributed to its successes, as well as
qualitative interviews of security and privacy professionals within
firms about security investments and the effects of security breach
notification laws in particular, this paper considers the extent to
which the current structure of security breach notification laws are
producing a “race-to-the-top” with respect to information security and
makes recommendations for statutory reforms aimed at facilitating such
a race by enabling greater public oversight, cross-firm learning,
market activity, and targeted regulatory intervention.

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. On Wednesday, February 6th, 2008, Professor Jenkins spoke at the UC Berkeley School of Information as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.

The audio for this lecture, titled “Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters,” is available here:

MP3 link

Abstract

According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating their own media as well as the challenges confronting those youth who are excluded from participation in these on-line worlds as a consequence of lack of access to technologies, skills, competencies, and cultural experiences taken for granted by their contemporaries. These issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. In the course of the presentation, I will be sharing a range of curricular materials and activities being developed by MIT’s Project nml to support the teaching of these new social skills and cultural competencies.

Bio

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. He is also the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games and of the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort with the MIT Media Lab to use new media to enhance how people live in local communities. He is one of the principle investigators for GAMBIT, a lab focused on promoting experimentation through game design, and of Project nml, a MacArthur Foundation funded project that develops curricular materials focused on promoting the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the new media era. Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.