Benjamin Mako Hill, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks Facebook’s ability to connect people and bind them to the social network is overrated to begin with. “Facebook didn’t exist, what, 10 years ago,” he says, and in 10 years, he thinks, “a company called Facebook will exist, but will it occupy the same space in our culture? That’s certainly not something I’m willing to take for granted.”

via Identi.ca, Diaspora, and Friendica are more secure alternatives to Facebook..

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler.

NSA Scandal Requires a New Church Committee | New Republic.

Jeffrey Schnapp is on a mission to save our libraries.As the director of both the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the metaLab at Harvard, he typically spends his days grappling with the urgent questions of the wired world, but right now, his most pressing concern is more concrete. In a rapidly digitizing world, he is asking what will become of physical libraries — and their material soul, books.

via The Library Test Kitchen at Harvard University – Boston.com.

To date, Macgillivray’s pro-user, damn-the-man attitude has permeated Twitter. He honed his philosophy at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and then at Google, where he was instrumental in introducing the company’s transparency reports and fought the Justice Department when it requested information on user search queries. He brought over a number of colleagues from Google, including head of litigation and intellectual property Benjamin Lee, who shared his views.

via Escape from PRISM: how Twitter defies government data-sharing | The Verge.

The recent revelations about the scope of the Obama administration’s secret surveillance programs have at least one silver lining: provoking a national debate about the right to privacy and prompting people to learn more about its ethical, legal and practical dimensions. Readers approaching this fascinating subject for the first time might want to begin with the best article on privacy ever written: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “The Right to Privacy,” first published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 and available online. After that warm-up, here are some of my favorite privacy books.

via Five books on privacy – The Washington Post.

With the business models in music broadcasting changing so quickly, there’s no royalty structure yet that works for everyone’s bottom line, according to Chris Bavitz, with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

“It’s hard to imagine that we’re going to get to a one size fits all music royalty rate for musical compositions,” Bavitz says. Until then Pandora is getting into the FM radio business.

via Why Pandora bought a radio station in South Dakota | Marketplace.org.

The ideas are not new or untested, but recently two heavyweights, former Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski and Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain both backed using Boston as a wireless testbed before the next time such a plan is needed.

via Former FCC Head: In times of crisis, open WiFi can keep us connected – Innovation – Boston.com.

Outgoing FCC chairman Julius Genachowski is calling for an emergency, private network in times of emergency for the city of Boston. In an op-ed penned for the MIT Technology Review with Harvard internet law professor Jonathan Zittrain, Genachowski makes the case for Boston to be the “first city where these networks are operational” in the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April.

via Former FCC chairman Genachowski calls for emergency ad hoc network in Boston | The Verge.

We can start with an idea that needs no additional technology. Many people and companies operate Wi-Fi access points. Each of these points—whether used by apartment roommates, Starbucks patrons, or cell subscribers who get Wi-Fi “off-load” from their service providers—is connected to the Internet and often remains so even if cellular voice and data towers are out or overloaded.

via Outage after Marathon Bombings Prompts Emergency Network Proposal | MIT Technology Review.

Mary Madden, senior researcher at Pew, and Sandra Cortesi, director of the Youth and Media Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, were among the authors of the report. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at the Berkman Center, has done extensive studies on youth’s social media use.

via Pew Report on Teens and Social Media Looks at Privacy, Race, ‘Social Media Divide’ | Mediashift | PBS.