Jonathan Zittrain

Last June, a team at Harvard Medical School and MIT showed that it’s pretty darn easy to fool an artificial intelligence system analyzing medical images. Researchers modified a few pixels in eye images, skin photos and chest X-rays to trick deep learning systems into confidently classifying perfectly benign images as malignant. ... Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, had similar questions when he read the team’s paper. “I was reminded of the time in the early 2000's when cybersecurity vulnerabilities were readily apparent but not yet often exploited,” Zittrain tells IEEE Spectrum.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a device that can capture an image of your retina and automatically detect signs of diabetic blindness. This new breed of artificial intelligence technology is rapidly spreading across the medical field, as scientists develop systems that can identify signs of illness and disease in a wide variety of images, from X-rays of the lungs to C.A.T. scans of the brain. These systems promise to help doctors evaluate patients more efficiently, and less expensively, than in the past. ...Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns. In a paper [co-authored by Jonathan Zittrain] published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is mulling the use of decentralized technology for his social media behemoth. Speaking with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said blockchain technology could be implemented as an alternative way for users to access, store and manage their private data. “Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice of whether to log in to different places and you’re not going through an intermediary,” he said in the Facebook Live interview.

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. .... Mark Zuckerberg started his 2019 challenge of doing public debates. Zuckerberg took part in an interview with Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain. Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn't want "a camera in everyone's living room," but seemed to forget that Facebook sells a camera that goes in living rooms. Jonathan Zittrain pointed out that Facebook sells a camera-equipped device for the living room — Facebook Portal, its smart speaker with video calling.

The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is conducting a hearing on election security tomorrow. It’s part of a series the new Democratic majority in the House is holding related to the H.R. 1 legislation on election security, campaign funding, and government ethics, entitled the “For the People Act.” ... Just Security asked several experts what questions they think would be fruitful for discussion at the hearing. ... Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

An op-ed by Adam Holland, project manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: In April 2018, the scandal over how Cambridge Analytica gained access to personal data of 50 million Facebook users led to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. A September 2018 security breach involved the personal information of at least 30 million users. ... A promising way forward comes from Professors Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School, whose work was incorporated into draft federal legislation.

Far-reaching discussions about the social impact of AI on the world are taking place among data scientists across the University, as well as in the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative launched by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center, together with the MIT Media Lab. This intensifying focus on ethics originated with a longtime member of the computer-science faculty. ... Bemis Professor of International Law and professor of computer science Jonathan Zittrain, who is faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, has been grappling with this goal from a proto-legal perspective.

Consumers are increasingly entrusting online services with all kinds of personal data — but that trust has been repeatedly abused or taken for granted. If a doctor or a lawyer did that, they’d be kicked to the curb, because they have a legally defined duty to protect privileged data. Why don’t Facebook and Google? They might soon, via the Data Care Act. This bill, proposed today by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and co-sponsored by 14 more Democrats in the Senate, would essentially establish a set of consumer protection duties, defined and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, preventing tech companies from knowingly doing harm to their users. ...The idea has been brought up before, notably by Yale’s Jack Bardin and Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, whom Sen. Schatz has previously cited.

At a time when social media affects everything from our private lives to our public discourse, the rules governing online behavior are increasingly under scrutiny. At Facebook, the process behind those rules — how they are determined, and how they continue to change — is the province of Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management. On Monday, Bickert, who holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, joined Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law, for a wide-ranging conversation about the social media giant’s policies and its evolution. The event, which included tough questions from audience members on the company’s recent headline-making controversies, was hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Harvard Law School is home to the world’s largest academic law library, with more than 42,000 volumes. So why not just put it all online for anyone to access?... But let me back up and explain how the database came to be, as described to me by Adam Ziegler, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. Library head Jonathan Zittrain first came up with the idea in 2013, and the lab established a partnership with legal research platform Ravel Law to get it off the ground...“At almost every level, what we were doing was the first time anyone had done it,” Ziegler told me.

Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet...Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It said: “To me, the most important function of the contract is to remind people that the web we have isn’t the only one possible. That’s both a warning – including about how aspects of the web have become – and an opportunity. The contract seeks to get those wielding the most power online to commit to some boundaries in how they treat their users.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You may find it a little eerie to discover that you are being rated by the companies you buy things from, and that the quality of customer service you receive can be determined by your “customer lifetime value” score. Maybe it reminds you too much of China’s new social credit system, which is intended to allow the government to keep tabs on citizens’ anti-social behaviors — and punish them by cutting off privileges like intercity train travel if they’re noncompliant. Better get used to it. We are no longer rated by only the credit reporting agencies, which are subject to extensive federal regulation...My Harvard Law colleague Jonathan Zittrain and my onetime teacher Jack Balkin have been arguing for some time now that tech companies should be treated by the law as fiduciaries of our data, essentially holding users’ information in trust on their behalf.

One of the reasons you're able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant is because you're not too worried that it's clean in the kitchen. That's because you know that restaurants have to meet a minimum standard of cleanliness, or risk being shut down. The restaurant is obligated to act in the best interests of its diners. This is one example used by Jonathan Zittrain to argue that it may be time to create a similar kind of obligation for social media platforms and other tech giants who hold our personal data. Along with Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin, Zittrain has long floated the idea that today's online tech platforms become 'information fiduciaries'.

Roughly two dozen Harvard Law School professors have signed a New York Times editorial arguing that the United States Senate should not confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Harvard affiliates — including former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and Laurence Tribe — joined more than 1,000 law professors across the country in signing the editorial, published online Wednesday. The professors wrote that Kavanaugh displayed a lack of “impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land” in the heated testimony he gave during a nationally televised hearing held Sept. 27 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee....As of late Wednesday, the letter had been signed by the following: Sabi Ardalan, Christopher T. Bavitz, Elizabeth Bartholet, Christine Desan, Susan H. Farbstein, Nancy Gertner, Robert Greenwald, Michael Gregory, Janet Halley, Jon Hanson, Adriaan Lanni, Bruce H. Mann, Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, Robert H. Mnookin, Intisar Rabb, Daphna Renan, David L. Shapiro, Joseph William Singer, Carol S. Steiker, Matthew C. Stephenson, Laurence Tribe, Lucie White, Alex Whiting, Jonathan Zittrain

Facebook is doing all of this election work out of a feeling of obligation to its user base. But what if it had a legal obligation to act in the best interests of its users? That’s the argument Jonathan Zittrain makes today in the Harvard Business Review, and it makes for thoughtful companion reading to the day’s war-room analyses. Zittrain’s piece explores the question of whether social networks should become what Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin calls “information fiduciaries.”

An article by Jonathan Zittrain. I used to be largely indifferent to claims about the use of private data for targeted advertising, even as I worried about privacy more generally. How much of an intrusion was it, really, for a merchant to hit me with a banner ad for dog food instead of cat food, since it had reason to believe I owned a dog? And any users who were sensitive about their personal information could just click on a menu and simply opt out of that kind of tracking. But times have changed.