• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, May 11, 2015

The White House has tapped Princeton's Ed Felten to join the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he will serve as deputy chief technology officer.

Felten, an influential expert in online privacy and copyright, previously served as the Federal Trade Commission's first chief technologist -- a position now held by Ashkan Soltani.

“Ed joins a growing number of techies at the White House working to further President Obama’s vision to ensure policy decisions are informed by our best understanding of state-of-the-art technology and innovation, to quickly and efficiently deliver great services for the American people, and to broaden and deepen the American people’s engagement with their government,” U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and Deputy Chief Technology Officer Alexander Macgillivray said today in a statement.

Felten also contributes to the Freedom to Tinker blog, where he offers his thoughts about privacy, data breaches and encryption. In one notable recent post, Felten weighed on the privacy implications of Facebook's decision to conduct a psychological experiment on its users. That experiment involved manipulating people's news feeds by filtering out either positive or negative posts, in order to examine whether mood was “contagious.” Researchers concluded that users' responses matched the tone of the posts they saw.

Several industry observers commented on whether Facebook violated ethical standards by failing to obtain users' informed consent before running the experiment. But Felten concluded that the experiment also potentially affected users' privacy.

“Experiments that manipulate user experience impact users’ privacy, and that privacy impact needs to be taken into account in evaluating the ethics of such experiments and in determining when users should be informed,” Felten wrote last July.

Felten also has long pointed out problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's approach to digital rights management technology. The DMCA has provisions that make it illegal to circumvent digital locks on software, even though doing so often is the only way to conduct research. The result, Felten says, is that the law not only discourages people from copying material, but also from engaging in legitimate research.

During his stint at the FTC, Felten worked on the World Wide Web Consortium's effort to develop standards to interpret browser-based do-not-track signals -- which aim to inform publishers and ad networks that users don't want to be tracked while surfing the Web. That initiative is still underway.