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Upcoming Events: The Great Firewall Inverts (1/13); Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap (1/20)

Berkman Events Newsletter Template
Upcoming Events / Digital Media
December 17, 2014
berkman luncheon series

The Great Firewall Inverts

Tuesday, January 13, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

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In the last few years, usage of the mobile messaging app WeChat (?? Weixin), has skyrocketed not only inside China, but outside, as well. For mainland Chinese, Wechat is one of the only options available, due to frequent blockage of apps like Viber, Line, Twitter and Facebook. However, outside of China, fueled by a massive marketing campaign and the promise of "free calls and texts", overseas Chinese students and family, Tibetan exiles, and Bollywood celebrities also use the app as their primary mobile communications service. It is this phenomenon that might be called an inversion of the Great Firewall. Instead of Chinese users scaling the wall to get out, people around the world are walking up to the front gate, and asking to be let in.

Combined with the rise of attractive, low-cost mobile handsets from Huawei and Xiaomi that include China-based cloud services, being sold in India and elsewhere, the world is witnessing a massive expansion of Chinese telecommunications reach and influence, powered entirely by users choosing to participate in it. Due to these systems being built upon proprietary protocols and software, their inner workings are largely opaque and mostly insecure. Like most social media apps, the WeChat app has full permission to activate microphones and cameras, track GPS, access user contacts and photos, and copy all of this data at any time to their servers. Recently, it was discovered that Xiaomi MIUI phones sent all text messages through the companies cloud servers in China, without asking the user (Though, once this gained broad coverage in the news, the feature was turned off by default).

The fundamental question is do the Chinese companies behind these services have any market incentive or legal obligation to protect the privacy of their non-Chinese global userbase? Do they willingly or automatically turn over all data to the Ministry of Public Security or State Internet Information Office? Will we soon see foreign users targeted or prosecuted due to "private" data shared on WeChat? Finally, from the Glass Houses Department, is there any fundamental diffence in the impact on privacy freedom for an American citizen using WeChat versus a Chinese citizen using WhatsApp or Google?

Nathan Freitas leads the Guardian Project, an open-source mobile security software project, and directs technology strategy and training at the Tibet Action Institute. His work at the Berkman Center focuses on tracking the legality and prosecution risks for mobile security apps users worldwide. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series

Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap

Tuesday, January 20, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

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Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In her book, Disconnected, Carrie James explores how young people approach situations such as these as well as more dramatic ethical dilemmas that arise in digital contexts. Based on qualitative research carried out as part of the Good Play Project, Disconnected is an account of how youth, and the adults in their lives, think about— and often don’t think about — the moral and ethical dimensions of their participation in online communities. In this talk, James will share key insights from the book and related work on supporting meaningful and civil dialogue online.

Carrie James is a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, and Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores young people’s digital, moral, and civic lives. She co-directs the Good Play Project, a research and educational initiative focused youth, ethics, and the new digital media, and the Good Participation project, a study of how youth “do civics” in the digital age. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

video/audio

Jessica Silbey on The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators and Everyday Intellectual Property

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Why do people create and innovate? And how does intellectual property law encourage, or discourage, the process? In this talk Jessica Silbey -- Professor at Suffolk University Law School -- discusses her recent book The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property, which investigates the motivations and mechanisms of creative and innovative activity in everyday professional life. Based on over fifty face-to-face interviews, the book centers on the stories told by interviewees describing how and why they create and innovate and whether or how IP law plays a role in their activities. The goal of the empirical project was to figure out how IP actually works in creative and innovative fields, as opposed to how we think or say it works (through formal law or legislative debate). Breaking new ground in its qualitative method examining the economic and cultural system of creative and innovative production, The Eureka Myth draws out new and surprising conclusions about the sometimes misinterpreted relationships between creativity, invention and intellectual property protections. video/audio on YouTube>

Other Events of Note

Local, national, international, and online events that may be of interest to the Berkman community:

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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.