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Francine Berman, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

(THE CONVERSATION) A famous 1990s New Yorker cartoon showed two dogs at a computer and a caption that read "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The cartoon represents a digital past when people required few safeguards on the internet. People could explore a world of information without having every click tracked or their personal data treated as a commodity.

The New Yorker cartoon doesn't apply today. Not only do your brows...