Berkman Buzz: July 17, 2014

Last week Google formally launched a blue-ribbon committee of advisors to help it implement the European Court of Justice’s new “right to be forgotten.” Its work is cut out for it, as the search giant processes more than 70,000 requests since May to decouple a claimant’s name from possibly true but still “irrelevant” (and presumably reputation-damaging) search results. Turning theory into practice has revealed unanswered questions – and some outright flaws – in the Court’s decision, regardless of where you might stand on the right’s philosophical merits.

I spent the last two days in meetings with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his staff, discussing their proposed Open Internet rules (aka net neutrality). Monday’s meeting was with a group of NYC VCs, and Tuesday’s meeting was with group of NYC startup CEOs and GCs.

Coming out of these meetings, and after working on this over the past several months, a few things have become increasingly clear. Specifically, what we mean when we talk about the “freedom to innovate” and why it’s important for the future of the internet (both infrastructure and applications).

I wrote on Facebook & social engineering online (broader issue): https://t.co/0InWxitsbV @tomcheshiresky follows up: https://t.co/oouaH68dua
—Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep)

In 2013, FOMO received its first scholarly attention from social psychologist Andrew Przybylskia and his colleagues (2013: 841). They defined it as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FOMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.” In this fairly clear definition, we see a recognition of anxiety, as well as a characteristic behavior. Similarly, contemporary discussion of FOMO entails multiple, often tangled, notions of social behavior including social comparison, addiction, anticipatory regret, and the paradox of choice. Hence, it is worthwhile to further understand what it is that people are speaking of when the lament a fear of missing out.

This first version of the Internet Monitor platform contains Internet filtering data from the OpenNet Initiative, broadband data from Akamai, speed and quality data from NetIndex, crowdsourced web blockage data from Herdict, broadband pricing data from Google and Communications Chambers, and more. Internet Monitor continues to seek and integrate new sources of data in order to provide policy makers, digital activists, researchers, and user communities with an authoritative, independent, and multi-faceted set of quantitative data on the state of the global Internet; as part of our second phase of development, we’ll be incorporating both additional data and new functionality.

Wow — cat privacy just became a thing: http://t.co/F0c5xy5xyX #facial_recognition #CATastrophy
—Ashkan Soltani (@ashk4n)

When Zambia's President Michael Sata's team released photos of a supposed cabinet meeting to local media and published them on Facebook, it was meant to put to bed allegations that the leader isn't well nor working.

Instead, the images have further fanned the criticism, and some are doubting the authenticity of the meeting because there is no audio or video footage to back it up.