MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier

Preparation for week of class on September 13
Personal information on the Web

Readings

• Read chapters 1 through 3 of David Brin's The Transparent Society.
• Find a news article that appeared during past year that involves the issue of personal information on the Web. We'll call on some of you to make short oral presentations in class.
• Read one of the exemplary student papers from the Fall 2005 offering of this class. This will give you some sense of what we expect as a paper for the class. As you're reading, remember that these papers are two years old, and there have been enormous changes in some of the things that the authors were writing about (e.g., Facebook and Google). Think about what kind of paper you might want to write this semester: we'll talk about some ideas in class.

Watchings

• Look on the web for the CNBC video Big Brother, Big Business. It's two hours long, so we don't expect you to watch all of it. But check out the intro, which is the first three minutes. Then skim through the whole thing and pick a segment to watch, which we'll ask you to comment on in class. A good segment is the one on Acxiom, which starts at 46:45 and runs for about 10 minutes, through the part about public data on Google.

Writings

• We'll post an assignment to the rotisserie on Friday morning, September 8. As with all rotisserie assignments, this will have two parts: one where you write your assignment, and one due a couple of days later where you comment on someone else's assignment.

  The assignment will be to brief US Court of Appeals case Mainstream Marketing Services v. Federal Trade Commission (10th Cir, 2004). Details to be posted on the rotisserie.