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Stanford Promises Not To Use Google Money For Privacy Research
An anonymous reader writes Stanford University has pledged not to use money from Google to fund privacy research at its Center for Internet and Society — a move that critics claim poses a threat to academic freedom. The center has long been generously funded by Google but its privacy research has proved damaging to the search giant as of late. Just two years ago, a researcher at the center helped uncover Google privacy violations that led to the company paying a record $22.5 million fine. In 2011-2012, the center's privacy director helped lead a project to create a "Do Not Track" standard. The effort, not supported by Google, would have made it harder for advertisers to track what people do online, and likely would have cut into Google's ad revenue. Both Stanford and Google say the change in funding was unrelated to the previous research.
If you want us to believe that you take our privacy seriously, you would do the opposite and create an endowment exclusively for privacy research.
An external audit is much more credible than the internal one.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2014/09/stanford-research-independent
Money quotes, emphasis mine:
"Julia Angwin's blog post today is incorrect. Stanford never promised not to use Google money for privacy research. "
"Julia asked me how we would deal with a situation where someoneÃ(TM)s "work on net neutrality or copyright, for instance, could wind up in the field of privacy." I told Julia: "No area of CIS research is 'barred'. We are free to work on whatever we like, including privacy. That makes things easy." Unfortunately, Julia did not include my statement in the piece."
Stanford says it's an "internal policy": https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/...
But this makes absolutely no sense. If all money goes into a general fund, there's no distinguishing "whose" money it is, it's Stanford's money.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
The summary has an interesting slant that being Google's restriction on the use of their contributions limits academic freedom. The legal filing puts it in a different light as the restriction on the use of funding eliminates any possible conflict of interest in the privacy research as the funding can not come from Google who could be hurt by the research. (Look near the bottom of the document)
One of the neat things about money is it's all the same.
When it comes to research, this is almost never true. Almost all research grants come with very specific rules about how the money can and can't be used, and strict accounting procedures about how the spending rules are to be verified.
Imagine if Stanford published some privacy-related research, and there was a note at the bottom "This Paper was Partially Funded by a Grant From The Google Foundation", or whatever... there'd be a huge outcry of how tilted and biased the results must be because Google was paying for some or all of it.