Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the software we use.

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

Maintaining an orderly, peaceful, safe, and productive society will increasingly depend on maintaining trust in information systems. However, trust cannot be realized by technology alone. The notion of trust extends far beyond the narrow technical realms of information security. Engineering trustworthy systems requires an understanding of human psychology. It requires effective public policies and laws and must work within those policies and laws. It requires the right business models and incentives. And often, one needs all of these elements working in harmony. But the reality we witness today is different. Engineers work primarily with technical specifications to build information systems, and their success is often measured by purely technical metrics. This approach, by itself, does not address the broader issues that contribute to trust. To build a successful technology-enabled society, the entire cyber security paradigm must be re-examined and integrated with broader issues.

CRISSP combines security technology strengths with experts in psychology, law, public policy, and business from NYU. The goal of this center is to build new approaches to security and privacy that recognize that technology alone cannot provide the information security and privacy needed in today’s interconnected world. The center is founded by Anindya Ghose (NYU Stern), Ramesh Karri (NYU Poly), Nasir Memon (NYU Poly), Helen Nissenbaum (NYU Steinhardt), and Rae Zimmerman (NYU Wagner).

Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.