Jonathan Zittrain

Are you having a crushingly tedious day at work? Try playing Google autocomplete. Type the start of a question into the world’s most trusted search engine, and marvel as the aggregated curiosity of the global crowd is marshalled to anticipate your inquiry. ...Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School has since described the potential for “digital gerrymandering” — tech corporations influencing the outcome of elections by, say, sending voting reminders to some users and not others. Facebook and Twitter already know your political leanings. Digital gerrymandering is possible whenever personalised information is served up by an intermediary, and it can tilt the game when margins are narrow.

...With the presidential election around the corner, Science asked experts in computer science, business, and law to weigh in on how companies like Google and Facebook, which function as the primary gateway to online information for millions of voters, could influence the outcome...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, has written about Facebook’s unique ability to mobilize voters by placing reminders in their newsfeeds. If it wanted to, Facebook could mobilize users likely to vote in line with the company’s interests (as it tried to do in India) based on their demographic group and geographic location—a sort of digital gerrymandering capable of garnering hundreds of thousands of additional votes.

When Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions. Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond...Perhaps we’ll also see a shifting of social norms. If everyone’s embarrassing behavior is accessible in perpetuity, we may become inured to employees’ college benders and even to senators’ sexts. Will paranoia reduce misbehavior, or will humans be humans and maintain our blithe and blundering ways? “It’s hard to change our daily habits,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “I don’t know if that’s a reason for optimism, because it means we’re not going to be chilled, or pessimism, because we appear to be resigned to losing our privacy without thinking it through first.”

An op-ed by Jack M. Balkin and Jonathan Zittrain. We tell online services what we like, who we love, what we are doing, and where we live, work, and play. And they in turn provide us with a window to the world, shaping what we see and suggesting what we should do. As we use these services, they learn more and more about us. They see who we are, but we are unable to see into their operations or understand how they use our data. As a result, we have to trust online services, but we have no real guarantees that they will not abuse our trust. Companies share information about us in any number of unexpected and regrettable ways, and the information and advice they provide can be inconspicuously warped by the companies’ own ideologies or by their relationships with those who wish to influence us, whether people with money or governments with agendas. To protect individual privacy rights, we’ve developed the idea of “information fiduciaries.”

Dean Baquet wasn't bluffing. The New York Times executive editor said during a visit to Harvard in September that he would risk jail to publish Donald Trump's tax returns. He made good on his word Saturday night when the Times published Trump tax documents from 1995, which show the Republican presidential nominee claimed losses of $916 million that year - enough to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years afterward..."The courts could say, if the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes," said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School. Zittrain told me that "if the New York Times received the return information not from the government after it was filed but from a private citizen, such as one working for Trump, and from Trump's own records, criminal liability may be less clear. Which could mean that ascertaining where the material didn't come from is as important as where it did."

Technologies too complex to be easily understood by the layperson can be playgrounds for unscrupulous politicians. That’s become the case with the Internet’s internal digital plumbing, which has come into the crosshairs of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Donald Trump. Cruz and Trump, along with a passel of other Republicans on Capitol Hill, have decided to throw a conniption fit over a routine, if complicated, transition in the technical governance of the Internet scheduled to take place Saturday — if a last-ditch maneuver in the House of Representatives doesn’t block it...As Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet expert at Harvard who has served on an ICANN advisory committee, observed in 2014 after the Obama White House issued its transition plan, ICANN had virtually no authority over how Internet users behaved online. You could register the website www.gap.clothing “through an ICANN-approved process,” he wrote; but ICANN would have no jurisdiction if you “sell fake Gap clothing on your website goodclothes.clothing.”

Republican lawmakers are accusing the Obama administration of allowing countries like Russia, China and Iran to take control over the Internet. Their beef with the administration focuses on a relatively obscure nonprofit overseen by the U.S. government that is scheduled to become fully independent Saturday. The organization is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short. Its history traces back to a graduate student at UCLA named Jon Postel. He started keeping track of the unique numbers assigned to particular computers using the Internet, during its early days. Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet law professor at Harvard, says Postel kept a clipboard to make sure no user had the same number — sort of like a phone book. "It was just sort of an honor system that would stop Caltech from coming in, or Bulgaria, from saying, 'You know what, we're going to start using those numbers,' " Zittrain says. "It's just something that would be a way of coordinating as people came online and needed to use numbers and, later, names."

Donald Trump has maintained for seven months that he cannot release his tax returns because he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, making him the first major-party nominee for president since President Gerald Ford to withhold such records from the public. Last week, his son Donald Trump Jr. gave a different excuse for not releasing the documents, saying the returns would be “distracting.” With so much speculation surrounding them, the GOP nominee and wealthy businessman’s tax filings may just be the most wanted information of the 2016 campaign...“The courts could say: If the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School.

Facebook set a new land-speed record for situational irony this week, as it fired the people who kept up its “Trending Topics” feature and replaced them with an algorithm on Friday, only to find the algorithm promoting completely fake news on Sunday. Rarely in recent tech history has a downsizing decision come back to bite the company so publicly and so quickly...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, likened Facebook’s decision to use impersonal aglorithms to “confining things to the roulette wheel.” “Even the casino isn’t supposed to know what number is going to win when it spins. And so, if there’s some issue, at least it isn’t intentional manipulation by Facebook,” he told me. Google claims the same innocence with its search results, he said.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. This month, Apple previewed some changes to its next generation of iPhones and iPads with the promise that “all the things you love to do are more expressive, more dynamic and more fun than ever.” That especially includes emojis, those little icons that, according to one study, 92 percent of the online population now make part of their everyday communication. One change in particular, though, is not delighting everyone. Apple’s new suite of operating systems appears to replace its pistol emoji, which was an image of a six-shooter, with a squirt gun...To eliminate an elemental concept from a language’s vocabulary is to reflect a sweeping view of how availability of language can control behavior, as well as a strange desire for companies — and inevitably, governments — to police our behavior through that language. In the United States, this confuses taking a particular position on the Second Amendment, concerning the right to bear arms, with the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, including speech about arms.

Do the benefits of allowing social platforms to host your journalism outweigh the disadvantages? Most publishers, however reluctantly, will say yes and adopt the “we are where we are” argument...In his 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain invoked AOL and the rest as a counterpoint to the internet. He described the latter as a “generative” platform, one that “invites innovation” in contrast to the service offered by the former which he labelled “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control”. At the time of writing his book, Zittrain’s key frame of reference was the Apple iPhone, launched the previous year. Acknowledging that the iPhone was beautifully crafted, he cautioned that the control the company exerted over hardware and software ran counter to “much of what we now consider precious about the internet”.

Passcode’s group of digital security and privacy experts say the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – meant to prevent illicit trespassing on computer systems – is written far too broadly and often results in punishments that are too harsh for the infractions. ...The broad legal boundaries of the CFAA have also allowed prosecutions of computer crimes to proceed if hackers are found to have violated a website’s terms-of-service agreement, some Influencers say. “That overreading should be soundly rejected,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain has been searching tediously for answers involving impact websites like Google and Facebook may have on the election, according to Huffington Post. Zittrain has been floating around ideas about modified search results and customizing the news available to users, which could potentially sway undecided voters. Looking at all the dimensions of this picture makes one realize; this is one of those puzzles that came with some missing pieces.