An American Alternative to Europe’s Privacy Law; The New York Times, May 30, 2018

Tim Wu, The New York Times; An American Alternative to Europe’s Privacy Law

"To be sure, a European-style regulatory system operates faster and has clearer rules than an American-style common-law approach. But the European approach runs the risk of being insensitive to context and may not match our ethical intuitions in individual cases. If the past decade of technology has taught us anything, it is that we face a complex and varied array of privacy problems. Case-by-case consideration might be the best way to find good solutions to many of them and, when the time comes (ifthe time comes), to guide the writing of general federal privacy legislation.

A defining fact of our existence today is that we share more of ourselves with Silicon Valley than with our accountants, lawyers and doctors. It is about time the law caught up with that."

Facebook patent tries to guess users' socioeconomic status; Axios, February 2, 2018

Kim Hart, Axios; Facebook patent tries to guess users' socioeconomic status

"A new patent from Facebook describes a system that would use data points it collects on the user — like education, travel history, the number of devices owned, and homeownership — to predict their socioeconomic status. The patent was spotted by CBInsights.

Why it matters: The social network, which is already coming under fire for knowing too much about its users, could use such a system to better target ads and content to specific audiences."