Helen Nissenbaum
Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Her work focuses on ethical and political implications of digital technologies on issues such as privacy, bias in digital systems, trust online, ethics in design, and accountability in computational and algorithmic systems. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator, McArthur Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Security Agency have supported her research. Recipient of the 2014 Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association and the International Association of Computing and Philosophy Covey Award for computing, ethics, and philosophy, Nissenbaum has contributed to privacy-enhancing free software, TrackMeNot (protecting against profiling based on web searches) and AdNauseam (protecting against profiling based on ad clicks). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in philosophy and mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
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Essays and Scholarship
Algorithmic Displacement of Social Trust
The problem with social media isn’t problematic content alone—it’s the elimination of processes we rely on to guide our decisions and keep us informed.
By Benjamin Laufer & Helen Nissenbaum