Even simple features can have far-reaching effects, like improving voter turnout. As Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain wrote last year, Facebook could decide an election without anyone knowing it by notifying some users that their friends had voted but not others. While no evidence of “digital gerrymandering” has ever come to light, there’s enough risk to make people keep a close eye on the implementation of Facebook’s efforts to register people to vote and encourage them to participate in the democratic process.

Source: Facebook Study Says Users Control What They See, But Critics Disagree

Of all the winners of the 2015 Webby Awards, the winner of the law category might have the most lasting effect. And not just because it’s a groundbreaking project. Rather, perma.cc got the nod for an effort that could help solve a major problem for legal analysts and academics: the tendency, over time, of a hyperlink to “rot,” or lose its original URL.

Source: Digital Preservation: Are You Doing Enough to Prevent Link Rot?: Associations Now

Not surprisingly, some find fault with that assertion.“There is no scenario in which ‘user choices’ vs. ‘the algorithm’ can be traded off, because they happen together,” writes Christian Sandvig, an associate professor of Communication Studies and Information at the University of Michigan and associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, on the blog of the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

Source: SiliconBeat – Facebook study: Political echo chamber is users’ fault, not Facebook’s

Christian Sandvig says only 9% of Facebook users identify their “ideological affiliation” in a way that was “interpretable.”Of those that report an affiliation, only 46% reported an affiliation that was “interpretable,” said Sandvig, who is an associate professor at the University of Michigan and a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Source: Does Facebook contribute to a political echo chamber?

The month after my grandmother died, I received several emails from her. Not from her, of course, but from an old AOL email account of hers that had been taken over by spammers. My mother and other family members called to ask me — the granddaughter who studies computer security — to make the emails stop. We were all strangely unsettled by these messages from beyond the grave, by my grandmother’s sudden appearance in our inboxes so soon after we’d lost her. More than just spam, this felt like a ghost in the machine.

Source: The Ghost in the Machine – NYTimes.com

“If you’re selling consumers something they can’t live without, and you’re subject to neither oversight nor competition, consumers aren’t going to be happy,” Susan P. Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, recently told The New York Times.

Source: How can we fix America’s broken telecommunications industry? – Fortune

Susan Crawford, visiting professor of law at Harvard University  and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, calls it “a big concern” that Google and Facebook are the ones becoming the portal to Web content for many newcomers.“For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,” she says. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human life.”

Source: Stop fretting over Airtel Zero, Flipkart: Worry about Facebook, Google instead – Firstpost

Ziegler notes that many others within the lab, the library and the HLS community contributed and should be recognized. “Jack Cushman, a lab and Berkman Center fellow, and Annie Cain, a lab web developer, have worked closely with Matt on the technical side. Claire DeMarco, research librarian, handles a lot of the library and journal coordination. Other key contributors are Shailin Thomas, Jordi Weinstock, Jeff Goldenson (formerly of the Lab), Chris Bavitz (Berkman Center), Geneve Bergeron Campbell (Berkman Center), Greg Leppert (Berkman Center). “

via Harvard Library Innovation Lab wins a 2015 Webby – Harvard Law Today.

“Problematic new laws are emerging in democratic and authoritarian countries alike,” according to the summary of Freedom on the Net 2014, a report released in 2014 by the independent watchdog organization Freedom House. While every government has a legitimate need to protect its country’s infrastructure, trade secrets, and public safety, “the problem here is to balance our concerns over protecting our computer networks—especially in the way they interact with critical infrastructure—with personal liberty and privacy,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a CAS computer science visiting lecturer, in a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

via Internet Insecurity | BU Today | Boston University.

And as a lawyer rather than a professional librarian (a fact he seems a tad defensive about), Palfrey is particularly good at explaining new legal challenges to preserving information. Libraries can purchase books and then lend them out as often as they like. But when libraries are renters rather than owners of digital materials — as is the case with e-books — their ability to lend is limited by licensing agreements. Because of longstanding copyright laws, “the digital age could perversely become an era with less accessibility, not more, than the analog age.”

via Do we still need libraries? – The Washington Post.