Why your online data isn’t safe
In a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center, discusses what might be done to protect users from companies that profit from people’s data.
Evaluating the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights
AI-based tools are increasingly being used by people and organizations in positions of authority to make important, often life-altering decisions. A new report from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society addresses this issue and weighs the positive and negative impacts of AI on human rights.
HLS Library Book Talk: “Butterfly Politics”
At a recent Harvard Law School Library Book Talk, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a pioneer of legal theory and practice and an activist for women’s rights, discussed her latest book “Butterfly Politics,” in which she argues that seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations.
Big questions raised by big data
During the introduction to the book launch event for “Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics,” one of the editors, Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, told a story about how powerful – and perhaps foreboding – big data can be.
The politics of Facebook and what to do about it
While the data firm Cambridge Analytica and questions of data privacy propelled Facebook into the headlines in recent months, Facebook has been under the critical eye of media scholars for years. “The sad conclusion to my book is that the problem with Facebook is Facebook,” declared Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and […]
Wendy Jacobs, Harvard officials call on EPA to withdraw proposed ‘transparency’ rule
A letter drafted by HLS’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Director Wendy Jacobs, and signed by nearly 100 hospital leaders and Harvard faculty, calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed rule on scientific “transparency,” saying that the change would drastically limit the scientific and medical knowledge that underlie a host of EPA regulations that protect human health.
Morality in the Machines
Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society are collaborating with MIT scholars to study driverless cars, social media feeds, and criminal justice algorithms, to make sure openness and ethics inform artificial intelligence.
Last Lecture: Alex Whiting on lessons from an unexpected relationship
Professor of Practice Alex Whiting chose a personal story for his Last Lecture to the class of 2018, one about the development of, and lessons learned from, an unexpected relationship.
20 years of the Laws of Cyberspace
It’s been two decades since Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig published ‘The Laws of Cyberspace;’ recently, an event at the Berkman Klein Center celebrated how that groundbreaking paper provided structure to the Center’s field of study.
Human Rights in a Time of Populism (video)
The global impact of populist movements was the topic of “Human Rights in a Time of Populism,” a two-day symposium held at Harvard Law School, where participants examined the challenges that current developments characterized as populist pose to the goals of the international human rights system.