The Dataverse is not done growing. The next complete overhaul, due in 2016, will address the challenges of confidentiality. Now being developed in conjunction with the Center for Research on Computation and Society at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, IQSS, the Data Privacy Lab, and the Berkman Center, Dataverse 5 will negate the need to strip confidential material ― names, personal medical histories, etc. ― from research before it is uploaded.

Source: Information, writ widely | Harvard Gazette

Online video has the advantage of customizing its output for target audiences. “There’s nothing fundamentally new about the phenomenon,” says Dan Gillmor of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We’ve been using online forums for a long time for the same purpose: to take a deep dive into arcane or niche subjects.”

Source: Want to be the next Food Network Star? Upload a YouTube video instead. – The Washington Post

Publishing that sort of information would seem to fall within the legal tests protecting news organizations in the US, where celebrities, politicians, and others who have entered the public sphere have very limited ability to keep other parts of their lives secret, noted Andy Sellars, a lawyer and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.“Public figures in general have a really hard time trying to bring a privacy claim,” he said.

Source: Ethics, law collide in questions over accessing Ashley Madison leak | BetaBoston

Mr. Battles’s “Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word” is in part an explanation of how it was possible for “a craft so sophisticated and cognitively demanding to knit itself securely into our quotidian ways.” To tell the story of the history of writing, the author, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, draws on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, linguistics and old-fashioned story telling. This fascinating exploration of the evolution of writing shows how, despite radical technological changes, the practice maintains its atavistic mystery.

Source: The Mystical Writing Pad – WSJ

That, says Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies social media and identity, is a real problem for young people.”There’s an enormous audience on social media, but it’s also when you see people face-to-face, you might see five people have heard something you know, thats basically the limit,” Donath said. “Online, it can extend in an infinite direction in both time and space.”

Source: In Rash Of Boston Violence, Shootings Follow Tensions On Facebook | WGBH News

“You can worry about intellectual property on a college campus, but a lot of the cases we’ve seen have not been that,” says Josephine Wolff, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Wolff says colleges are facing a tough choice: sacrifice security for the sake of access, or lock down their networks and undermine collaboration and sharing on campus. “I think what’s really at stake for the universities is trying to maintain this atmosphere of being open collaborative research institutions but to not be worried that they’re going to be kind of a gateway in for bad guys,” says Wolff.

Source: Cyber Ed: How higher education is re-evaluating a growing threat | Public Radio International

“France is asking for Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment,” said Jonathan L. Zittrain, who teaches digital law at Harvard Law School. He pointed out that, if enacted, the French regulator’s order would prevent Americans using an American search engine from seeing content that is legal in the United States. “That is extremely worrisome to me.”

Source: ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread – The New York Times

Free speech advocates and promoters of the right to privacy are divided on the matter. On the one hand, the former believe that the decision to impose delinking on all Google websites impinges upon people’s access to information that they should, by American law, be able to freely access. “France is asking Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment,” Jonathan L Zittrain, a professor of digital law at Harvard Law School tells the New York Times.

Source: Google And EU Wrangle Over ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Law Global Implementation : BIZ TECH : Tech Times

Harvard law professor Jonathan L. Zittrain agrees with her echoing this response by saying, “France is asking Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment. That is extremely worrisome to me.”

Source: Google and CNIL’s feud over “right to be forgotten” is getting out of hand

Mr Fleischer is right. The logical consequences of the French demands are absurd. As Jonathan Zittrain, the Harvard law professor, puts it: “France is asking for Google to do something here in the US that if the US government asked for, it would be against the first amendment.” The French regulator’s order, if enacted, would “prevent Americans using an American search engine from seeing content that is legal in the United States”.

Source: In the battle of free speech now it’s France v Google | Comment is free | The Guardian