Hoboken Beach Rake

The beach at Maxwell Place Park in Hoboken is a rarity. It is the only publicly accessible, natural-sand beach on the lower Hudson River.

As such, it's a popular destination for kayakers, canoers, cold plungers and others. But it also collects trash, as winds, waves and currents push floating debris into the inlet that shelters its crescent of sand.

Keeping the beach clean is a responsibility shared by all who enjoy this exceptional location — a hint of the natural world amid overbuilt surroundings. 

I created this rake from driftwood that came ashore at Maxwell Place Park, and left it there for any Samaritan who wants to help keep our community beautiful. Alongside, I posted a sign urging people to use it to rake up plastics and other trash, and place them in a garbage can nearby.

 If you like, take a photo of yourself using the rake and share it with me at timothykarr@gmail.com. I’ll post it here at the HobokenLocal blog. 

Who’s Going to Protect Reproductive Rights Online?

 

Chicago protests, June 24. (photo: Timothy Karr)

Co-authored with Nora Benavidez for Tech Policy Press

Following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, 13 states have or will soon have laws that criminalize abortion, and at least five more are ready to follow. Those trying to determine how and where they can obtain reproductive healthcare face added layers of complexity when they use the internet and their smartphones to learn more. Law enforcement can now weaponize online data to investigate, harass and take legal action against people seeking abortions.

Despite the severity of the situation, social media platforms and other tech companies are failing to grapple with how the Supreme Court ruling should alter their content-moderation and user-privacy guidelines. Few could muster a coherent response when reporters from MIT Technology Review asked for clarity. 

We can already tell from recent reporting that they’re making a mess of it. Companies including Meta and Google have overcorrected for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision in ways that could further jeopardize the health and liberty of millions of people. 

Before they do more harm, online platforms and internet service providers must change how they collect data about their users and ensure that they’re not sharing information that puts abortion seekers at risk. Congress, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and tech companies themselves each have power to safeguard the rights of those seeking reproductive health services. 

Privacy and the Digital Dragnet

This situation was decades in the making. Authorities can access pretty much anything we do online and via our smartphones. And there’s little that social-media platforms and other technology companies can do if police with a legal warrant or court order seek the user information these businesses have collected.

Google, for example, received more than 20,000 U.S. location data warrants between 2018 and 2020. This included dragnet orders demanding data about everyone who was near a particular location. In the hands of law enforcement seeking to charge abortion seekers, this would give them the power to locate a person at an abortion-services provider’s address at a given time. Google, which produces the Android operating system for hundreds of millions of mobile devices, says that as a matter of company policy it is required to respond to legal warrants.

There’s an additional risk to people who search for reproductive health-care information, such as how to order “abortion pills” via any of the online providers of this medicine. Internet service providers can keep records of the websites their users visit. When you send a text via SMS, your phone company stores copies of all those texts. These can be turned over under a warrant.

AT&T, for example, received 77,996 criminal subpoenas for user information from federal, state and local authorities in just the last six months of 2021. Like other companies that hold user data, AT&T says it is required under the law to provide customer data in response to court orders, subpoenas, lawful-discovery requests and other legal requirements.

What Congress Can Do

The absence of clear federal data privacy laws is a major concern. Layer over that the patchwork of state-level prohibitions on abortion and things become far more confusing for people seeking reliable abortion information online. The glut of websites and social-media posts featuring inaccurate medical and legal advice makes matters even worse. The platforms’ own rules for addressing these issues remain murky and are inconsistently enforced. 

One fairly straightforward solution is for these companies to stop collecting data about what their users are doing online, and where they’re going offline. Platforms, search companies and internet service providers must change their data-collection and retention practices so that they no longer gather or store individualized search and browsing histories and unnecessary customer-location information. 

To that end, Congress is considering several privacy bills that limit the data companies can collect. Various pieces of legislation currently on the table would reduce or prohibit the collection, retention and use of sexual health information, while others protect healthcare, genetic, biometric and geolocation data more generally, or even ban any use of such data in a way that violates people’s civil rights. But online entities still would be able to use such data with individuals’ consent, in order to respond to the requests that users make for information on these crucial topics.

Free Press Action is part of a large coalition of civil and digital rights groups fighting to minimize the personal information platforms and data brokers can collect and limit how they can use it. Another strong legislative proposal is the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which closes a loophole that currently allows these brokers to sell our data to police without a warrant.

While none of these proposals are a perfect fix for this complex and crucial set of issues, these bills are meaningful measures that — if passed — could begin to ensure that tech companies are doing more to safeguard the privacy necessary for protecting reproductive rights.

What the FTC Can Do

The FTC is charged with oversight of unfair or deceptive practices related to the harvesting, sharing or sale of personal data, including health-related information.

For months now the agency has been teasing plans to begin a rulemaking proceeding to rein in the misuse of online data by social-media companies and other data brokers. In May, the Senate confirmed the agency’s fifth commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, an experienced privacy advocate who has supported agency action alongside FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan and Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. 

The agency has put a proceeding on its summer calendar and has the majority it needs to establish clear rules against abusive data practices that undermine reproductive rights and access to health care. Through an open and participatory rulemaking, the FTC can build a record of the harms related to the trafficking of personal and geolocation information and establish guardrails against unfair and deceptive extractive data practices. Such a rule would help mitigate these harmful data practices embedded in every sector of society, which we know to especially harm historically disadvantaged communities.

What Platforms Can Do

Legislation and FTC rules together won’t fix everything. People researching reproductive health-care options are seeking information on social-media platforms. With state-level abortion restrictions, sharing this kind of information in those states presents a significant content-moderation challenge.

Recent research finds that content from less reliable sources referencing abortion has more than doubled since the Dobbs ruling was leaked in May. Platforms have yet to apply the sorts of user-warning labels to abortion misinformation that they’ve applied (albeit in a haphazard fashion) to inaccurate posts about COVID-19 treatments and elections.

We’ve already seen risk-averse social-media companies overreact to abortion-related content. Meta, for example, technically has a gun-sale ban on its platforms. Yet it allows users to violate that policy 10 times before penalizing them. Meanwhile, just in the last week Facebook and Instagram have removed individual posts about sales of abortion pills. It seems likely that these companies will also ban ads for abortion services in states that have outlawed abortions.

If they’re forced to do so, they and other online advertisers must also refuse to accept advertising dollars from entities seeking to mislead people seeking abortions (for example: by posing as clinics that provide these services or spreading disinformation).

Social-media platforms have an ethical responsibility to invest in moderators who are specifically trained to spot such harmful content. These companies must ensure that people seeking abortions aren’t targeted for abuse or exposed to disinformation.

The difference between 2022 and 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, is that we now live in an era in which data about what we do, with whom and where, is in the hands of tech companies and data brokers that are willing to sell this information to the highest bidder — or hand it over to federal, state and local authorities.

As tech companies wield increasing power over everyone’s digital rights, they must collect and archive less user data and establish clear standards for sharing potentially lifesaving reproductive health-care information. The Supreme Court’s abortion decision makes the need for comprehensive action more urgent than ever. Congress, the FTC and tech companies must do what is necessary to protect reproductive rights.

Nora Benavidez is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press Action, where Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy and communications.

Truck Fire at the 495 Hoboken Exit Bottleneck Shuts Down Eastbound Tunnel Traffic for Hours

 

Finding Frank in Hoboken

In 1955 Swiss photographer Robert Frank visited Hoboken to document the city's centennial celebration. It's a day that generated several memorable Frank photographs, including two that open his masterful photo essay "The Americans."

This above image features on the cover of the book.

In the spring of 2009, the National Art Gallery opened an exhibition of Frank's monograph. Titled "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans," the show traveled from Washington, to San Francisco to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where I viewed the work and purchased the catalog.

In the catalog and on display were contact sheets from Frank's day in Hoboken. These recently unseen images featured urban landmarks that still stand today. From these I was able to retrace the footsteps of Frank in Hoboken — from City Hall, where he photographed preening local politicians, down Washington Street to the building featured in the cover photo. I located the windows at 70 Washington Street where I believe Frank captured the image:

I was fairly certain the above image shows the right pair of windows based on a contact sheet image from his second camera, in which the flag is clearly visible in a wider frame including the building to the north:

Here's my present-day photograph from a somewhat similar angle:

Note the orientation of the two floors with the northern floor approximately four to six inches higher. Also note the detail of the corresponding window lintels.

I then looked more closely, photographing the brick patterns between the two windows. I compared these to those of the original cover image. The match is unmistakable:

The top image is from the present and the lower from 1955 with my trace in orange.

I then checked this brick pattern against all of the other sets of windows along Frank's route down Washington Street. There was no other match.

Hoboken on the Half Shell

Oysters!

I spotted these clusters during a walk with my teen-age daughter near Hoboken’s Sinatra Park. They were exposed by a recent low tide. I confirmed them as genuine items after scrambling over a barricade and down to the waterline for close inspection. Eleanor, who’s frequently embarrassed by her father's enthusiasms, coaxed me back to the path for fear a passing friend might take notice. But not before I took a few photos of these little and, for a century, rare local beauties.

Oysters are woven into the history of New York Harbor. When Henry Hudson sailed into the estuary he encountered a Lenape tribe that maintained oyster beds on both sides of the river. The Dutch who settle "Manahatta" named Pearl Street after the massive Lenape oyster middens that lined the East River. According to author Mark Kurlansky, shells were piled so high that the Dutch used them as pavers, giving the street its name.

By the 18th Century, New York Harbor oysters were renowned worldwide for their variety and sweetness. Those grown in the Gowanus Canal (yes, that canal) were particular favorites. African American businessman Thomas Downing ran Downing’s Oyster House at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets. The oyster cellar was a favorite spot of the city’s elite during the early 1800s. But oysters were not just for the well-to-do; they were common to the diet of working-class New Yorkers, an abundant and thereby cheap source of protein, iodine, calcium, and iron.

By the early 20th century these beds had disappeared from the Hudson estuary following decades of industrial pollution and sewage runoff. They're now making a comeback thanks to the efforts of groups like the Billion Oysters Project, Hudson Riverkeeper, and NY/NJ Baykeeper (look them up and throw them some support).

Oysters contributed to the pristine ecosystem that the Hudson estuary once was. They're their own river keepers: When Oysters feed they filter nitrogen from the water. When there’s an excess of nitrogen algae blooms form, depleting oxygen from the water to levels harmful to other marine life. The more oysters in a marine ecosystem, the less nitrogen. The less nitrogen, the healthier the water is for other species. During its heyday, the Lower Hudson had more than 200,000 acres of oyster beds. According to Kurlansky, that was enough to filter all of the water in the harbor in a matter of hours.

Ann Fraioli, director of education for the Billion Oyster Project, said: “When you put oyster reefs back in the water, biodiversity flocks to it.”

While the Billion Oyster Project focuses repopulation efforts on the New York side of the Hudson — owing to New Jersey State restrictions against oyster cultivation — this cluster along the Hudson's west bank indicates Hoboken oysters are doing it for themselves.

Cutting Deals with Big Tech Won't Save Journalism

This week, Australia will put the finishing touches on a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay millions of dollars to local news publishers in exchange for featuring their content on their powerful platforms.

Many in the news industry are hailing Australia’s bargaining code as a way to bring Big Tech to the table and save journalism at a time when news outlets are struggling.

And to the table Big Tech has come, but its response hasn’t been helpful.

Last Wednesday, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced that it had struck a three-year deal with Google that would provide access to the company’s empire of news content in exchange for “significant payments” from the search giant. That’s a windfall for a conglomerate that’s notorious worldwide for serving its news with heaping portions of disinformation and bigotry.

Facebook responded with the nuclear option: Instead of settling on a fee it prevented any of its users from sharing links to Australian news sources. For several days it was impossible to post news from Australian sources; Facebook’s heavy-handed info blackout extended to government health sites providing critical COVID-19 vaccination information to Australians.

Australia’s bargaining code is an early foray by lawmakers seeking to reset the balance of power between tech platforms and a news industry that’s failing to keep pace with the digital economy. This accounting is important — and governments should be doing more to make these massive online networks accountable for the damage they have done to democratic society — but there are better ways forward for Australia and other countries weighing similar measures to support journalism. Murdoch and others in the newspaper industry are pushing to reintroduce legislation in the United states (what some call “Murdoch’s Law”) which would also force a payment negotiation between powerful U.S.-based news businesses and Silicon Valley.

There are several reasons the Australian experiment won’t work in the United States. If the initial reaction from Google and Facebook is any indication, it doesn’t appear to be working too well for Australia either.

Looming in the background of this debate are major shifts in the economics of news production. The U.S. ad industry has moved away from buying placements in traditional media entities that produced news (like newspapers) toward cheaper, more finely targeted options offered by digital platforms that don’t (like Facebook and Google).

Allowing the most powerful media conglomerates to negotiate payments from the most powerful tech conglomerates is an attempt to rebalance the equation. But giving handouts to News Corp. won’t help the sorts of local, civic-minded news outlets and reporters who have suffered most under this new digital economy. And funding traditional news operations doesn’t meet the needs of communities of color and working-class families, who’ve been long overlooked or misrepresented by U.S. media.

We can’t solve the platform-dominance problem and the journalism-funding problem with a solution that makes both problems worse. Turning every instance of link sharing into a government-mandated monetary transaction would forever alter the fundamental openness of the internet. We need to invest in new journalism — not entrenched corporate power and gatekeeping.

Taxing the attention economy
The best way to do that is by supporting innovations in news production that put journalists back to work, and better connect them with the people and communities they report on. At Free Press Action we’ve put forth better remedies for the United States, including a proposal for a tax on online advertising. The resulting revenue would be placed in a Public Interest Media Endowment and used to fund the kinds of diverse, local, independent and noncommercial news and information that have gone missing.

For example, a 2-percent ad tax on 2020 advertising revenues of the top-10 online platforms would yield more than $2 billion for the endowment. As Facebook’s, Google’s and Amazon’s share of the digital advertising space increases, so would its tax commitment to help save journalism.

Others have put forth ideas for the future of journalism that also deserve attention from lawmakers. We can’t let these be shunted to the side in favor of a legislative proposal that’s being pushed in Australia and the United States by the Murdochs and other media oligarchs.

Instead, we need strong public-media laws that prioritize a free press, civic-minded news production and the interests of the communities news outlets are supposed to serve.

It’s increasingly clear that market-based solutions for news production aren’t helping foster a more equitable and inclusive democracy. In the United States, commercial media share a sizable portion of the blame for the rise of Donald Trump — and, with him, Trump-style white nationalism.

What happened in the 20th century, when local print, radio and TV outlets were the best way for advertisers to target local audiences, was a historical fluke. Attempts to rebuild or insulate that old-media model in the 21st century are a fool’s errand. Future solutions must involve new hybrid private- and public-sector models, or direct public funding for journalism, so long as it includes guardrails to protect the editorial independence of news organizations on the receiving end.

Incentivizing these sorts of funding models is the right path away from a commercial-media system dominated by too few players. While Australia’s proposal is a sincere attempt to make Facebook and Google pay for the harm they’ve caused journalism, it’s not the final word. Nor should it be.

In Transit: Photos of People on the Move

In transit: photos taken from 2014 through 2020 of people commuting from place to place — mostly from Hoboken and Jersey City, NJ to New York, NY. From the series Trans-Hudson.