News and Research articles on Google+

Volume 3, Issue 4

Staking out the unclear ethical terrain of online social experiments

Cornelius Puschmann, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Engin Bozdag, Delft University of Technology
PUBLISHED ON: 26 Nov 2014 DOI: 10.14763/2014.4.338

The 'Facebook online social experiment' has caused much controversy. Researchers Cornelius Puschmann and Engin Bozdag review the debate around research ethics and come to the conclusion that "benefits for science should be balanced with possible hazards that may be caused by experiments, rather than precluding that such benefits outweigh the gains".

KEYWORDS: Research ethics, Online social experiments, Data science, Transparency, Algorithmic curation
Google Spain case (C-131/12)
1

German constitutional judge expresses concerns about the “right to be forgotten” decision

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 15 Aug 2014

The so-called right to be forgotten needs to be discussed a little more. Google has received 70,000 requests for takedowns of search results since the decision of the European Court of Justice in May 2014. Now the company gets support from an unexpected place: a German constitutional judge warns against potential dangers of the decision.

Digital economy

The clash between internet freedom and the need to tax

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 24 Jul 2014

Much of our economy is moving online, but who will pay taxes, when virtual is tax exempted or when only some regions earn from the digital businesses lured by nice lax tax regulation or otherwise. Read up on how the struggle for tax and data are intertwined.

Transparency
1

Vodafone and the number game

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 25 Jun 2014

Early this month, the mobile and internet operator Vodafone released a report putting figures on data disclosures made to governments. That's a first but can it be called real transparency?

Right to erasure

European Court rules against Google, in favour of right to be forgotten

Jef Ausloos, University of Amsterdam

PUBLISHED ON: 13 May 2014

The European Union’s Court of Justice has ruled against Google in a case in which a Spanish citizen, backed by his national data protection authority, wanted the company to remove search links to an old local newspaper story related to his bankruptcy. Jef Ausloos argues that implications should not be too extreme, but warns of the Court’s prioritising of data subjects over internet users. 

Volume 3, Issue 1
3

Decentralised internet governance: the case of a ‘peer-to-peer cloud’

Francesca Musiani, MINES ParisTech
PUBLISHED ON: 13 Feb 2014 DOI: 10.14763/2014.1.234

By retracing the stages of development of a 'peer-to-peer cloud' storage service, Francesca Musiani argues that decentralised network architectures are internet governance 'in practice'.

KEYWORDS: Internet governance, Science and technology studies (STS), Peer-to-peer (P2P), Decentralisation, Privacy by design, Internet architecture, Cloud
Volume 2, Issue 4

Flawed cloud architectures and the rise of decentral alternatives

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 1 Nov 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.212

Currently dominant cloud services raise challenges in terms of security, privacy and user autonomy. Decentralisation, advocated by civil society, may overcome some of the drawbacks.

KEYWORDS: Cloud computing, IT system architecture, Informational self-determination, Decentralisation, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Autonomy, Centralisation, Privacy
New gTLDs

What the new domain names could mean

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 30 Oct 2013

Just a week ago, the first new TLDs were pushed to the root zone of the internet. Just in time for the Munich Conference on New Top-Level Domains 2013. But what do all the new names on the net impact?

Data protection

EU data protection: bumpy piece of road ahead

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 24 Oct 2013

The European Civil Liberties Committee LIBE is pushing the EU data protection regulation draft forward. Yet, many compromises are made along the way, leaving Europeans wondering who will be the good, the bad and the ugly in the data protection saga.