MichaelZimmer.org

I’m again thrilled to be contributing to an American Library Association (ALA) webinar on generating issues and ideas for programming during the upcoming Choose Privacy Week. Details and my slides are below: The free, hour-long online webinar will take place on from 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, April 9 and will feature four [...]

The 14th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) is being held 24-27 October 2013 in Denver, Colorado. The full call for papers is below. See you there! Call for Papers Internet Research 14.0: Resistance and Appropriation 24-27 October 2013 Denver, USA Internet Research 14.0 will focus on the theme of [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an excellent article by Marc Parry on “As Libraries Go Digital, Sharing of Data Is at Odds With Tradition of Privacy,” noting that as libraries are beginning to collect and share patron data to build tools for recommending and discovering books, important concerns over patron privacy emerge, which [...]

Today I have the great privilege of presenting the preliminary results of a research project exploring the ethics of Twitter-based research, co-authored with Nick Proferes, at the second annual International Symposium on Digital Ethics, hosted by the Center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University Chicago. The abstract and slides are available below. Look [...]

Recently, I was approached by a team of researchers concerned with the research ethics issues related to using Facebook to recruit human subjects. Specifically, the team was planning to use Facebook advertisements in order to target certain users for a research study evaluating the effectiveness of a particular educational strategy aimed at decreasing the occurrence [...]

I’m very pleased to announce that the fourth book in the MIT Press “Information Society Series” I am co-editing with Laura DeNardis has been released: The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright Hector Postigo The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the [...]

Next week I will be a featured speaker at the first “International Symposium on Internet Ethics” hosted by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) and Korea Society of Internet Ethics (KSIE). Alongside other international representatives, I will be presenting a talk on “Internet Ethics Issues and Action in the United States,” where I outline [...]

I’m currently in Phoenix, AZ for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, participating on an important panel on “Researching Social Media: Ethical and Methodological Challenges“, organized by Anders Olof Larsson (Uppsala) and Hallvard Moe (Bergen). The panel is listed under the Communication and Technology division of ICA, but has implications well beyond that [...]

The 2012 edition of Choose Privacy Week, the annual initiative of the American Library Association that invites the public into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age, is wrapping up (and don’t miss our special screening of the short documentary film “Big Brother, Big Business: The Data-Mining and Surveillance Industries” tomorrow at [...]

In celebration of Choose Privacy Week, the American Library Association‘s Office for Intellectual Freedom has released preliminary findings from a new survey on “Librarian Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Informational Privacy” that I conducted on their behalf with generous support from the Open Society Foundation. The press release with preliminary results is copied below; the full report [...]