Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In “The Great Wall of Facebook,” Wired’s Fred Vogelstein contends that Facebook and Google are approaching a “full-blown battle over the future of the Internet.” Vogelstein’s assessment boils down to two predictions: (1) Facebook will lead and monopolize a fundamental shift to “a more personalized, humanized” web search, based entirely on information supplied by one’s social network; and (2) the vast amount of personal information supplied to Facebook by third parties and users themselves will (barring user revolt) yield massive profits through online brand advertising. A prediction that Facebook will gain some advantage over Google through its proprietary data would be hard to argue against. But Vogelstein’s particular vision of that general future—in which Google is conquered by a News Feed search based purely on users’ networks—runs into problems.

The wonderful website Pogo Was Right posted this video tutorial by the Network Advertising Initiative on how to opt out of behavioral targeting. I'm happy to see easy to follow instructions but continue to note the absence of an explicit promise that users who opt out will no longer be tracked.

No one likes lawyers. My dad likes to joke that it’s a shame how 99 percent of lawyers give the rest of us a bad name. Not only am I lawyer, but I am also trained as a journalist, which arguably ranks even lower on the list of ill-reputed professions in the U.S. So what happens when these two maligned professions go head to head?

Teneille Brown, Joshua Auriemma, and I helped Patient Privacy Rights draft the public comments it submitted to the Federal Trade Commission on Monday.