Privacy (2) Facebook's Mood Experiment

The challenge for any researcher investigating human behavior is that letting people know they're being investigated can prompt them to alter their behavior.  Information and consent can therefore confound research.  Ah but that's the very charge of researchers: that is, provide information and seek consent, as they must, and still protect the integrity of their methodology.  They need to draw on their ingenuity to strike this crucial balance.  So the answer to this young lady's question?  No, Facebook shirked its ethical, perhaps legal responsibility to its members.
 

Privacy (1) A Party Gone Wrong

A Party Gone Wrong can certainly be distressing for a teen and her family, but we can imagine far worse actions by someone masquerading as anyone of us on social media.  It is one thing to set policy or law against such behavior, but another thing to investigate and enforce it.  Regardless, though, I believe that sites ought to have some fair and reasonable responsibility to prevent masquerading and to intervene accordingly.  Otherwise we'd have cause to question the integrity and intent of a site and its members.
 

Reflections on Freedom Online

What these men and women speak to are a prompt for reflection and conversation.  Shame, though, that The British Library didn't engage a wider diversity of nationality and age for these interviews.
 

Freedom (5) Trolling as Freedom of Expression

Yikes!  It's troublesome to think that many people believe trolling to be a perfectly fine thing to do to others.
 

Freedom (4) Web Censorship in Schools

I suppose this is not just a clash between liberal and conservative schools of thought.  Values matter to people, and there is a melange of them, which defies dichotomies.  Sometimes these values collide in very personal, complicated ways.  Those in authority or those with influence may determine which ones are left standing, at the end of the day.
 

Freedom (3) The Right to be Forgotten

I find this question to be a terribly complex one.  On the one hand, if one has paid his or her dues, and by law a past transgression is no longer a matter of consideration, for example, for getting a job, buying a house, or obtaining a credit card, then why should it remain available?  On the other hand, I personally appreciate having any old information available on any person or topic of interest to me.  This is how I learn about the background of actors, for example, and how I probe more deeply into their filmography.  So the question comes down (a) morally to the freedom to move on with a clean slate and (b) pragmatically to the means with which to determine how ought to be, and ought not be, removed. 

Freedom (2) Cyberbullying and its Consequences

The answer in this situation is easy:  No.  What is difficult, though, is finding answers on to how to stop cyberbullying.  It requires patience and fortitude to do so, that is, in our working to get a better grip on the problem and what underlies it and on the perpetrators and what drives them.  It requires empathic understanding:  not to be confused with sympathy or compassion, but with the ability and willingness to probe into emotional, psychological layers.