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20 tech giants could face stricter rules in the EU. Will this hurt innovation?
Facebook, Amazon, Google, and other Silicon Valley leviathans could face new rules designed to control their market power, according to a new report in the Financial Times. EU regulators are forming a...
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Limiting the president’s power to shut down the internet
This post was originally published on November 3, 2020. A law written 86 years ago, when telephones were still somewhat novel, has inadvertently given the U.S. president the ability to shut the intern...
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We need more than surveillance to prevent police violence
This post was originally published on October 13, 2020. When you think about intrusive surveillance, you might conjure up an image of an all-seeing eye following you around as you go about your daily ...
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Quick biography: Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Manning’s disclosure of hundreds of thousands of confidential military and U.S. state documents resulted in a 35-year prison sentence. Yet without her whistleblowing, the world might never h...
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Quick biography: Julian Assange
In 2006, Australian computer programmer Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, the website that would eventually gain worldwide fame in 2010 for publishing Chelsea Manning’s leaked Afghan and Iraq war fi...
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Facebook: Our future in Europe is unclear
This post was originally published on October 8, 2020. Facebook says its fundamental service delivery model is under threat in Europe, as it does not know how it will adequately comply with an EU ruli...
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Surveillance capitalism: How every ‘like’ adds to your data for sale
Search for something innocuous like a pair of shoes, protein powder, or vacation ideas, and you know what happens next: Ads about similar products or services follow us around as we navigate the web. ...
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The social contract of the internet is under threat. That’s a problem
In the age of big tech, a small number of platforms have a leviathanic reach across the interwebs. We might be forgiven for thinking that this is the way things were meant to be. But that couldn’t b...
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Interview: Encryption expert Riana Pfefferkorn on the erosion of online free speech
This post was originally published on August 20, 2020. Riana Pfefferkorn is the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), a technology...
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Lockdowns highlight the need to repair devices ourselves
This post was originally published on August 19, 2020. Since the shift toward remote work and virtual hangouts and meetups, we’ve become evermore dependent on our devices. Phones and laptops have be...
Digital freedom
