Jonathan Zittrain

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.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last month the F.B.I. issued an urgent warning: Everyone with home internet routers should reboot them to shed them of malware from “foreign cyberactors.” Putting aside the strangeness that for once power-cycling a device could perform an effective exorcism upon it, the episode reveals more than just the potential for disruption of internet access for people using equipment they never expect to have to physically manage. It also underscores how unprepared we are to manage downstream-networked devices and appliances — the “internet of things” — that are vulnerable to attack. A longstanding ethos of internet development lets anyone build and share new code and services, with consequences to be dealt with later. I call this the “procrastination principle,” and I don’t regret supporting it. But it’s hard to feel the same way about the internet of things.

Today, the European Union cements its status as the global leader in data privacy. The E.U.’s sweeping new data privacy law is taking effect, ushering in new restrictions on what companies can do with people’s personal data and setting tough penalties for those that break the rules...The European law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, requires companies that collect data on E.U. citizens to use simple language to explain how they handle it. Companies must get explicit consent from consumers before doing anything with their information and allow them to request copies of their data or delete it entirely. The law also mandates that companies report data breaches on strict timelines. Fines for violations could cost them 4 percent of their global profits...What’s more, the GDPR’s ripple effects in the United States may have gone far enough, said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “In some ways Europe may be doing the job for us,” he said, “since companies above a certain size will be adopting GDPR-friendly practices for all users, not just Europeans.”

Bloomberg Boston Bureau Chief Tom Moroney and Radio News Anchors Peter Barnes, Pat Carroll and Anne Mostue are joined by top names from local business and finance to medicine and politics, along with Bloomberg reporters covering the latest stories in Boston, the Bay State and beyond...Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain explained what he believes Mark Zuckerberg could do to fix the mess at Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word “community” to describe the internet platform. In his 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg famously argued “Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” Indeed, “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” In his testimony before Congress this week, he again used the term several times. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together,” he told the Senate. The notion of this community of more than 2 billion users worldwide, and over 200 million in the United States, seems core to Zuckerberg’s conception of the platform, and perhaps his own identity. But is Facebook a community?...[Jonathan Zittrain]: “Community” is used all the time by social media and other Internet companies to describe their users. It’s a poor choice of words, adopted no doubt because it makes the relationship between subscriber and company seem less transactional than it really is.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The news about Facebook is not getting better. The company has sharply increased the number of users whose data was improperly shared with an outside company connected to President Trump’s campaign, to possibly 87 million. Amid an outcry, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. There is a dog-eared playbook for industry titans called before lawmakers: Apologize repeatedly, be humble, keep it boring. Mr. Zuckerberg can and should toss that playbook.

As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing...In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume. Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”...In addition to Baum and Lazer, the paper was co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.

An article by David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed.

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class-action lawsuit Monday claiming that the technology giant discriminates against white men and conservatives. Damore’s suit came on the same day that conservative publisher Charles C. Johnson sued Twitter for banning him from the platform in 2015. The cases are the latest signs of a broad effort by some conservatives to challenge technology companies on the grounds that they favor liberal or moderate voices, reflecting the prevailing political sensibilities in Silicon Valley...Courts in that state have in the past highlighted the importance of free speech rights even when exercised on private property, making the state potentially more amenable to Johnson’s claims about censorship on a private online platform such as Twitter, said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “Of all the places to bring a long-shot case like this, California would be the place,” Zittrain said.