I am working on creating a mapping of Jonathon W. Penney’s “Understanding Chilling Effects” with the graduate student, N. The more we discuss and read literature related to the Chilling Effect, the more complex our mapping becomes, but I think it also really helps to clarify the new topics that Penney has introduced in this paper as opposed to the last paper we were relying on, “Chilling Effects: Online surveillance and Wikipedia.” There are many types of Chilling Effects, but I hope we get to focus on either the social media, surveillance, or legal chilling. We also have been delving into legal papers which are difficult to read.

Besides the main project I get to work on, I am able to join in on weekly meetings with Dr. Cora and her students. We read weekly papers and discuss them. This week we read “SoK: Managing Longitudinal Privacy of Publicly Shared Personal Online Data.” During our discussion, we talked about how online gives people an excessive amount of information on people. For example, people can look up real estate information by visiting their local county clerk in person, but having that information available online makes the searching for someone’s information discretionary and secretive. I looked up my local county clerk that said “As of Monday, 11/5/2018, under a directive issued by the County Executive’s Office, the ——– County Clerk-Recorder’s Office will no longer offer an online search of the Official Record Index.” Their reason being that “These records will only be available for purchase in person or by mail. This affords greater privacy protections to all individuals whose information appears in the database, and furthers use of the index only for lawful and appropriate purposes.” There’s so many different security issues that I have now been made aware of!