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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Jonathan Zittrain Quotes

The increasing legal pressure against archives has created anxieties among researchers, librarians, and journalists. They cite the need to protect sources who wish to make a record for posterity; procuring documents and interviews from those sources will be difficult if the fruits are only one subpoena away from disclosure.

– Jonathan Zittrain

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you – and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.

– Jonathan Zittrain

If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Through historical accident, we’ve ended up with a global network that pretty much allows anybody to communicate with anyone else at any time.

– Jonathan Zittrain

I’m interested in helping secure the PC – we need innovation here. It’s not just hug your PC, hate the iPhone. In fact I don’t even hate the iPhone; I think it’s really cool. I just don’t want it to be the center of the ecosystem along with the Web 2.0 apps.

– Jonathan Zittrain

TV broadcasting is owned, in the sense that governments around the world have asserted power over the airwaves that permeate their territories, deciding who can use what bandwidth and why – and those with licenses then, with exceptions determined by regulators, decide what to broadcast.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Technologically, the Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new ISPs or new forms of expanding access.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Owned technologies are easy to grasp because they’re so prevalent. They’re technologies that are developed and shaped by a defined group, usually someone selling it.

– Jonathan Zittrain

I’m interested in harnessing the good will and distributed power of people, including novices.

– Jonathan Zittrain

The Internet’s distinct configuration may have facilitated anonymous threats, copyright infringement, and cyberattacks, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom in ways that the framers of the American constitution would appreciate – the Federalist papers were famously authored pseudonymously.

– Jonathan Zittrain

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others’ content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.

– Jonathan Zittrain

I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online.

– Jonathan Zittrain

The last refuge of privacy cannot be placed solely in law or technology. It must repose in both, and a thoughtful combination of the two can help us thread a path between having all our secrets trivially discoverable and preserving nothing for our later selves for fear of that discovery.

– Jonathan Zittrain

How an individual’s reputation is protected online is too important and subtle a policy matter to be legislated by a high court, which is institutionally mismatched to the evolving intricacies of the online world.

– Jonathan Zittrain

We face paired dangers. The first is that our networks are successfully attacked. The second is that our fear of attack will cause us to destroy what makes the Internet special.

– Jonathan Zittrain

When I think about privacy on social media sites, there’s kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn’t make them any less important or severe; it’s just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we’re going to solve them.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Search engines generally treat personal names as search terms like any others: Data is data.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers – and not to tell you about it.

– Jonathan Zittrain

One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.

– Jonathan Zittrain

I don’t know how much thought is behind it, but it seems to me highly effective the way that Facebook will let somebody tag a photo with a friend’s name, then others who are a friend of that friend can perhaps immediately see the photo, and the friend, in the meantime, has a chance to wander back and un-tag it.

– Jonathan Zittrain

The Internet is a collective hallucination: one of the best humanity has ever generated.

– Jonathan Zittrain

The problem is, we’re moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve.

– Jonathan Zittrain

Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met.

– Jonathan Zittrain

When I worry about privacy, I worry about peer-to-peer invasion of privacy. About the fact that anytime anything of any note happens, there are three arms holding cell phones with cameras in them or video records capturing the event ready to go on the nightly news, if necessary.

– Jonathan Zittrain

People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit.

– Jonathan Zittrain