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 [...]

Join the Center for Information Policy Research and the UWM Libraries for a special lecture by Dr. Kelly Gates (Communication, UC-San Diego) in celebration of Choose Privacy Week, an annual initiative of the American Library Association that invites the public into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. THE COMPUTATIONAL WORK OF [...]

Next week I will be attending iConference 2013, hosted by the College of Information at the University of North Texas, and presented by the iSchools organization, a worldwide collective of 39 Information Schools. The theme of the conference is “Scholarship in Action: ”, and I will be participating in three activities in support of this [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Join the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research and the UWM Libraries for a special screening of the short documentary film “Big Brother, Big Business: The Data-Mining and Surveillance Industries” in celebration of Choose Privacy Week, an annual initiative of the American Library Association that invites the public into a national conversation about privacy rights [...]

I’m very pleased to announce that the third book in the MIT Press “Information Society Series” I am co-editing with Laura DeNardis has been released: The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World Edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey Foreword by Craig Newmark In making decisions, we often seek advice. Online, [...]

(Update at end of post) I’m troubled by Wisconsin’s plan to create a database of all signers of the recall petitions. I know the political parties have access to the petitions in order to challenge signatures, but I’m unsure (and I’ll need to find out) if all signatures are generally a part of the public [...]