The Philosophy of Nate

We're Censoring Our Own Reality

The Internet is a place where freedom of speech reigns; except where it doesn’t. While everyone is free to share their thoughts, in whatever form they take, most sites impose limits on what can be shared. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; unlawful or hateful content don’t share a platform with lawful free speech. Sites usually explain what’s acceptable to share in their Terms of Service or equivalent document normally written in more pages of legal language than any normal person would ever care to read. These limits don’t stop everything and sites rely on users to report unacceptable content, which invites human moderation or prompts the site to automatically take things down.

Content moderation invites problems as much as it solves others. Algorithms that try to moderate content automatically are not perfect. YouTube, for example, has been combating videos that are built to make it through...

The Net Neutrality Fight is not Over

Today, December 14th, the FCC passed the Restoring Internet Freedom proposal which repeals net neutrality rules in a 3-2 vote, to nobody’s great surprise. While the result is disappointing, this is not where net neutrality ends! We need to make a lot of noise and support organizations that are fighting on our behalf. The University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation and Voice of the People reports that 83% of Americans were against the repeal. Popular opinion is on our side.

Where we go from here is uncertain but it’s not over. Fights for net neutrality are already gearing up and lawsuits are being filed. The New York Attorney General announced he will sue the FCC, and other organizations will likely follow suit.

He...

We Can't Tell When the Internet is Lying

We’ve long been told that we can’t trust everything on the Internet. At one point, that was a primary lesson taught to people new to the Internet. It turns out that we’re not very good at figuring out what online is true. In an effort to show more ads (and to keep people around longer) sites have made it harder to tell when something is true versus an ad. Many people have trouble telling when an image has been manipulated. With the rise of fake news, more people are confused or doubting real news, or simply care less about the truth as long as what the Internet claims matches their beliefs. Even the people we expect to be the most Internet-savvy are not good at figuring out what to trust in some cases.

In a study of 700 men and women, only about 60% of participants were able to tell when a picture had been manipulated, which is only slightly better than guessing at random. Of the ones who were able to identify manipulated images, less than half could tell what in the imag...

Who Owns Your Thoughts?

Targeted advertising and targeted news feeds are commonplace online. Services try to tailor what they show to keep you interested so you’ll spend more time on their site, and hopefully, click more ads. Using the information from how you react to what they show you, they build a profile of your interests to better tailor what they show you. Unfortunately, those services don’t have an interest in making sure you see a neutral view of the world or even that you see every post from the people or brands you follow. They’re interested in providing results that are relevant to you, whether or not they’re always correct, so they can gather more information and continue selling advertisements.

Interest targeting takes a lot of different forms online. The most obvious is online advertising, which comes as no surprise to people accustomed to the Internet showing them ads for things they searched for recently. Much of the online economy and free-to-use services rely on this to fund w...

Beyond Network Neutrality

Net neutrality is immensely important to keeping the Internet open for every voice and for ensuring that no ISP can curate what information its customers have access to. However, it’s not the only neutrality fight important to keeping the Internet alive. While net neutrality requires ISPs to provide access to the entire Internet and deliver every site equally, there are few neutrality requirements for online services themselves. As the world moves online and hosting services and social media become critical platforms for independent voices, there is no guarantee that those platforms will be neutral. With allegations around foreign interference via online platforms in the 2016 election and actions various cloud providers have occasionally taken to silence sites, the discussion of how online services can curate what their users see is building.

Hosting and social media platforms h...

What does "metadata" actually mean?

One of the buzzwords around online surveillance and leaked NSA data collection programs has been the word “metadata.” The government doesn’t collect content of communication, just the “metadata” we’ve been assured, which seems to imply that collecting only metadata—though at times, far more than just metadata has been collected—is acceptable and respects our privacy. Unfortunately, “metadata” is a broad term and allows for a large amount of data collection. Not only that, but collecting metadata is not subject to regulations as stringent as those requiring warrants for wiretapping.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “metadata” as “data about other data.” Everything stored digitally has some sort of metadata associated with it, such as where it lives on a computer, who created it, who owns it, or where it came from. Th...

Opposing net neutrality threatens the viability of open source communities

The net neutrality discussion is, at its core, about free speech on the internet. Free speech online is a driving force for the online community; an average of 1.32 billion people each day share their voices on Facebook alone (as of June 2017). It’s possible to be heard as well, with more than half of Americans using the internet as their primary source of information. Unfortunately, internet service providers (ISPs) want their own say in how free speech actually is online, with some claiming their own rights to free speech when it comes to what people can access.

ISPs are serious about their free speech claims when it comes to net neutrality. Several ISPs and telecom associations have filed briefs with the U.S. Court of Appeals arguing that net neutrality prevents them from favoring their own servic...

Keep Up with Net Neutrality - Preorder My New Book!

July 12, 2017 was the Day of Action for Net Neutrality. Across the Internet, sites showed banners, slowed themselves down, and tried to make it clear what a non neutral Internet might look like. It’s not pretty. A tiered, throttled, and restricted Internet would likely hurt your favorite web services, making them harder to access and more expensive.

Net neutrality is one of the most important digital rights battles we’ve had so far. The battle is raging and doesn’t appear to be ready to end soon with the FCC suggesting it will ignore pro net neutrality comments and telecom lobbying kicking into high gear. Net neutrality matters to everyone because it prevents ISPs from picking and choosing what parts of the Internet - and what information - you have access to when you get online. If we lose net neutrality, ISPs will gain a lot of power over our ability to be informed.

Net neutrality is so important, that I’m releasing a book about it on August 7, 2017. It details ...

Go Comment on the FCC Net Neutrality Proposal

This week, the FCC published its promised proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules. The proposal claims to “restore Internet freedom” by undoing Title II classification. In addition, the proposal asks whether net neutrality rules are necessary to protect the Internet at all. This comes after a court decision that refused to re-hear a challenge to Title II. Rather than focus on the benefits of Title II and net neutrality, as well as the fact that Title II has been found legal, it focuses on dissenting opinions which have in some cases been debunked (or that are generally accepted to be false) in order to explain unproven holes in net neutrality.

The FCC head has called net neutrality a mistake, arguing among other things that there is plenty of competition in the broadband Internet market, that net neutrality would harm consumers, and that net neutrality would stifle innovation. Evidence to the contrary for all of those is prevalent. Very few people have more than two ho...

The Fight for the Internet

In 2002, the FCC classified Internet providers under Title I, an “Information Service” classification. This is generally regarded as a win for net neutrality advocates but didn’t go as far as many wanted. Title I classification has been referred to as a “hands off” or “lite” classification in that it recognized that the Internet was an important means of communication but provided minimal regulations around that status. Specifically, Title I allowed the FCC some indirect authority to regulate interstate and international communications, but did not allow regulation of services themselves. Net neutrality advocates considered this to be too little. While the FCC promised that Title I would allow them to enforce net neutrality as needed, Title I by its definition did not allow them to follow up on those promises.

ISPs (in particular, Verizon) fought Title I classification...