I’ve been busy with my last semester in college, but here’s some stuff that I’ve been reading:
A fun paper by two CMU researchers about the unreasonable expectation for users to read privacy policies. From the abstract:
The national opportunity cost for just the time to read policies is on the order of $781 billion. Additional time for comparing policies between multiple sites in order to make informed decisions about privacy brings the social cost well above the market for online advertising. Given that web users also have some value for their privacy on top of the time it takes to read policies, this suggests that under the current self-regulation framework, targeted online advertising may have negative social utility.
Also, a pretty technical economics theory paper on the economics of network neutrality, which neatly builds on the price discrimination discussion we had two weeks ago. Tyler Cowen summarizes:
A strict welfare calculation is indeterminate in the theory of price discrimination, yet the standard presumption is that price discrimination is welfare-improving. That is all the more likely to be the case when investment in new capacity, and usage, is endogenous.
To me, the author’s conclusion sounded more like (in their own words):
The focus of much of the network neutrality debate has been on schema that are forms of second-degree price discrimination. Because content providers must be induced to play their part in any such price discrimination scheme, the set of feasible schema is restricted. Hence, even if network neutrality—no exclusion and no discrimination—is not welfare maximizing generally, it could be welfare-maximizing within this restricted set. In particular, if the elasticity of content demand with respect to transmission time does not increase with households’ time sensitivity for the content, then network neutrality is welfare maximizing within the set of feasible schema. If that elasticity is invariant with households’ time sensitivity for the content, then network neutrality is welfare superior to all other schema (feasible or not).
I’ll need to look more closely before I have something intelligent to say about it.
—Mar 04, 2012
I’ve been following Cesar Hildago’s research on visualizing the economy and understand from novel approaches at the MIT Media Lab for the past year or so now. And I love it!
Hausman and Hildago recent published their latest interactive data visualization of paths to prosperity for different countries. I haven’t read through it in detail, yet, but it’s definitely worth commenting on.
—Feb 22, 2012
Two days ago, an online form-building start-up Jotform posted a blog post announcing that:
As a part of an ongoing investigation about a content posted in our site, a
US government agency has temporarily suspended ourjotform.com domain. We are fully cooperating with them, but it is not possible to say when the domain would be unblocked.
It seems that many users are angry at Jotform for having content that led to the seizure, even though the supposedly infringing content is suggested to be a phishing form posted by users.
Here are some more juicy details from theNextWeb. Here is Jotform founder’s message on Hacker News. It appears that the original site has now been restored. Forbes wonders if the seizure has been done without a warrant.
This raises uncomfortable concerns for entrepreneurs. The safe-harbor protection for copyright seems not to extend for other forms of user-generated content. While this is unlikely to harm large companies such as Google or Facebook, it seems that those who require protection, such as budding businesses like Jotform, can suffer fairly large losses. It therefore looks likely that this incident will soon be a larger issue for the Internet community.
—Feb 17, 2012
Jonathan Zittrain, a prof whom I’m taking a class with, is offering a talk “Minds for Sale” about online crowdsourcing and labor market at Harvard today at 3pm. Since I wasn’t able to attend, I decided to watch the youtube video of a previous version of the talk last night:
I’m a huge fan of Zittrain and it’s a fantastic talk. Here are some of the interesting legal and ethical problems that arise:
Perhaps most interesting though are the many examples of online labor and collaborative filtering:
- Netflix prize, X-Prize, and Innocentive - Prizes for scientistic breakthrough
- SamaSource - microtasks for Kenyan refugees
- LiveOps - Fungible, online phone operators
- Amazon Mechanical Turk, Askville, and Turker Nation
- ESP Game and ReCapture - Luis von Ahn
- Google - PageRank a kind of crowdsourcing
- Internet Eyes - Crowdsourcing private surveillance
- Crowdsourcing US Border Control
- Smartdrive - Crowdsourcing driving quality control
- Open Mind Common Sense
- Sense Networks
Other emerging trends come to mind too:
- Kickstarter - collaborative funding
- Kaggle - prize platform
- Codeacademy - collaborative teaching
The implications of these markets and platforms are well worth thinking about.
—Feb 01, 2012
