Digital Life Initiative | Ethics | Policy | Politics | Quality of Life NOV - DEC 2020 |
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DIGITAL LIFE INITIATIVE Director's Welcome As a surreal 2020 draws to a close, I am inspired by the DLI community. Even as the pandemic immersed us in an unavoidable experiment in digital living, we continued to engage with urgent ethical challenges: unprecedented participation in the DLI seminar, research meetings, leading edge scholarship, dedicated learning, and collaboration with colleagues around the world. Thanks to a steadfast commitment from Cornell Tech and the generosity of supporters, DLI has flourished with amazing people and new programs, some showcased in this issue of DLI Dispatch. – Helen Nissenbaum |
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PHENOMENAL WORLD Data as Property? By Salomé Viljoen, DLI Postdoc Fellow Since the proliferation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, critics of widely used internet communications services have warned of the misuse of personal data. Alongside familiar concerns regarding user privacy and state surveillance, a now-decades-long thread connects a group of theorists who view data—and in particular data about people—as central to what they have termed informational capitalism. Critics locate in datafication—the transformation of information into commodity—a particular economic process of value creation that demarcates informational capitalism from its predecessors. Whether these critics take “information” or “capitalism” as the modifier warranting primary concern, datafication, in their analysis, serves a dual role: both a process of production and a form of injustice. READ MORE |
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SPRINGER Case-Study Analysis of the Israeli Cybersecurity Regulatory Regime By DLI Postdoc Fellow Ido Sivan-Sevilla and National Cyber Directorate's Shani Sharvit The literature on risk and regulatory governance has barely heeded the institutionalization of cybersecurity regulatory practices by national policy regimes. As the role of the state in cybersecurity governance is gradually expanding, we still lack an empirical and theoretical understanding of how the regulatory state copes with the cybersecurity governance challenge. Therefore, we ask how the role of the state has expanded in leading cybersecurity governance efforts? What characteristics of cybersecurity governance challenge the regulatory state? And how the Israeli cybersecurity regulatory regime has been addressing those challenges? READ MORE |
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THE INFORMATION The Tech Giants’ Cultures Are Incompatible With Fixing the Societal Problems They’re Causing By Yaël Eisenstat, DLI Visiting Fellow In her recent opinion piece for The Information, Yaël Eisenstat – former head of Global Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising at Facebook – argued that the company's culture is incompatible with prioritizing the public good. "The chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter are rightly under fire for their role in spreading disinformation and hate speech, including in the context of the U.S. presidential election.They’ve been summoned to testify before the U.S. Senate today in part about their responsibility for the real-world harms their business models are causing. But at the heart of the problems with big tech is an issue unlikely to be addressed: company culture." READ MORE |
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AIPP PROJECT MacArthur Foundation Supports AI, Policy, and Practice Project Involving DLI Director and Affiliated Faculty Congratulations to Helen Nissenbaum, Karen Levy, and Jon Kleinberg on receiving continued support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their multi-year AI, Policy and Practice Project: "Housed within the College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, we approach AI as a fundamentally socio-technical phenomenon, one that must be understood with both normative depth and technical precision. We combine technical, sociological, philosophical and legal expertise and methods, in order to more fully understand and more wisely develop the future path and impact of AI. We aim to contribute to — and engage with — researchers, policymakers, and practitioners." READ MORE |
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PUBLIC INTEREST TECHNOLOGY PiTech & DLI Announce Impact-Driven Summer Internship New Collaborative Program for PhD Students PiTech and DLI will support a talented cohort of PhD students during the 2021 summer while they work with a community organization or strategic public sector office, contributing their technical skills and expertise. In parallel, a values in design program will help students incorporate a deeper understanding of societal issues and ethical perspectives relating to their specific internship projects. Thanks to a generous $1 million grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies, the PiTech initiative was launched in 2020 to develop the tools, systems, data sets, research, and education needed to address significant public sector concerns. PiTech will leverage the strengths of DLI, particularly as more leaders from industry and government turn to us for guidance on challenges surrounding privacy, cybersecurity, blockchain, and AI ethics. Contact Deborah Estrin for more information: destrin@cornell.edu READ MORE |
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DIGITAL LIFE INITIATIVE Online Manipulation Workshop Hosted by DLI Manipulation, nudging, and dark patterns have become troubling watchwords in a new language of online power and influence. These practices pose urgent and complex problems for the conduct of social life online. Strategic actors are exploiting new capacities to engineer environments and behaviors, taking advantage of both intimate and massive data about persons and publics. Coming to terms with online manipulation requires all hands on deck. DLI hosted an international cross-disciplinary, multi-methodological workshop, Understanding and Combating Online Manipulation: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda, to investigate the tools at our disposal and the values at stake as we confront the threats manipulation pose to fairness, dignity, autonomy, and democracy. The workshop organizing committee included Daniel Susser (Penn State University), Lee McGuigan and Helen Nissenbaum (DLI, Cornell Tech), and Beate Roessler (University of Amsterdam). |
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Studying the Privacy Behaviors of Mobile Apps at Scale Serge Egelman (ICSI) |
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The Truth About Fake News: Measuring Vulnerability to Fake News Online Joshua Tucker (New York University) |
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Design Choice: Mechanism Design’s Digital Drift Lee McGuigan (DLI, Cornell Tech) |
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Is Unmaking Design? Samar Sabie (DLI, Cornell Tech) |
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AdTech & Our Privacy – Dark Present, Brighter Future? Robin Berjon (New York Times) and Ido Sivan-Sevilla (DLI, Cornell Tech) |
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The Platform Insurgency: Does Urban Tech Have an Ethics Problem? Anthony Townsend (Cornell Tech), Gary Johnson (NYC Mayor's Office), Molly Turner (Berkeley), & Ren Yee (UNStudio) |
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Measuring the Unmeasured: New Threats to Machine Learning Systems Congzheng Song (DLI, Cornell Tech) |
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Watch more seminars from DLI's Video Channel? Or, read student commentaries about the seminars on our Reflections page. READ MORE |
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5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PUBLIC POLICY Public Policies for Digital Risks: A Comparative Policy Analysis Call for Papers DLI Postdoc Fellow Ido Sivan-Sevilla is excited to be chairing a panel at the 5th International Conference on Public Policy in Barcelona, and is calling for paper submissions: “We invite papers seeking to advance research on the drivers of public policy outcomes (or non-outcomes) to govern digital risks, focusing on the political dynamics, interest groups, institutional dynamics, and ideational theories.” READ MORE |
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Postdoc Research Fellowship Applications will be considered beginning on January 15, 2021 until position is filled. READ MORE Tech Law & Policy Fellowship Applications will be considered beginning on January 15, 2021 until position is filled. READ MORE Industry Affiliates Program Join our mission in shaping the future of digital societies by promoting ethical and political values, and quality of life for all. CONTACT Allison Graf (amg277@cornell.edu) |
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Spring Digital Life Seminar New Time: Thursdays, 12.00 - 1.15pm MORE INFO Critical Reflections Analytical Commentary & Research MORE INFO More DLI Info Jessie Taft (jgt43@cornell.edu) Michael Byrne (mjb556@cornell.edu) DLI WEBSITE @dlicornelltech FOLLOW US |
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