Week 11 Takeaways

1. The FCC ruled that ISPs which gather lots of information would be required to get explicit “opt-in” consent before they can share information with a third party. Internal purposes wont require “opt-in” consent, but do require an option to opt out. These rules are proposed and will be implemented pending public comment period.
2. The question of the week was about monitoring the social media accounts of K12 students by school administrators to protect against cyber bullying. None of the class considered such monitoring to be appropriate. Some claimed that the program would not be effective because students use so many social media platforms that the bullies would always migrate to unmonitored services. This was countered with the question, "If this at least stops "casual" bullies, is it not a success?" In a similar vein, some said that students would switch to old fashioned bullying such as beating other students up, and asked the question, "Is it not a judgement call? Deciding whether physical or emotional violence is worse." Finally we discussed whether this is an appropriate role for school administrators, some arguing that this opens up more avenues for creepy abuse by school admins.
3. YikYak is an anonymous social media platform in which users can post in their current geographical area. The app is self regulating, as users can up vote and down vote content to increase or decrease visibility. If a post receives a total score of -5or less, it is removed. In order to combat hate speech, threats of violence, and other objectionable content YikYak automatically warns users if the post that they are about to submit contains certain keyword (ensuring users think twice before posting unsavory content). YikYak also cooperates with law enforcement if physical threats are posted.
4. FBI/Apple case the issue if now mooted, as the FBI has accessed the data on Farook's phone. The FBI has said that they will aid other law enforcement agencies in decrypting other iPhones. There is still some legal question as to whether the FBI has a legal obligation to turn over the flaw which they used to unlock the Farook phone. This flaw or 0-day is still technically a backdoor and it still effects millions of iPhone users work wide. It is unlikely the the FBI will hand it over without a trial, and the results of such a trial are hard to predict.
5. In class we discussed a hypothetical where a girl named Sally is being harassed by a boy named John using school provided iPads that the students can take home. Sally doesn't bring the issue up with school officials or her parents and finally takes her life in the school cafeteria.
   
   The above plot shows how the class awarded the blame. Note that this is a box an whisker plot. For each of the parties, the percents are divided into 4 sections (the two colored rectangles and each of the whiskers. Each of the 4 regions contains 1/4 of the votes for that percentage of blame. This means that we were fairly evenly split from 50% to 80% for the amount of blame John deserved, while most of us attributed zero to 5% blame on Sally and her parents, some of us attributed as high as 10% of the blame to Sally. It was suggested in class that the blame for Sally might be higher, but that no one wanted to blame the victim.