MichaelZimmer.org

Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a privacy and data ethics scholar whose work focuses on digital privacy & surveillance, the ethics of big data, internet research ethics, and the broader social & ethical dimensions of emerging digital technologies.

Dr. Zimmer is Director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society at Marquette University, and Professor & Vice-Chair in the Department of Computer Science.

I was privileged to be featured in the Milwaukee Business Journal as one of the “10 People to Know in Technology“, and thrilled I could highlight the work we are doing at the Marquette Center for Data, Ethics, and Society.

Updates:

Marquette University has launched a new Center for Data, Ethics, and Society to address the ethical, social and political dimensions of our increasingly data-driven society.
New grant! Yaxing Yao, Danny Huang, and Jessica Vitak and I have been funded by the NSF to collaborate on a new project: Supporting Privacy Negotiation Among Multiple Stakeholders in Smart Environments.
Excited to be named to the “Data Privacy & Ethics in AI Advisory Board” for Macmillan Learning to help them address issues regarding data privacy and ethics in AI models and their applications in educational technology.
Was fun to be included in the “Facebook Gets a Facelift” episode of the new season of Vox’s “Land of the Giants” podcast on Meta/Facebook.
I am part of a team of experts helping Gizmodo release the “Facebook Papers” in a responsible and ethical way. Details at “We’re Making the Facebook Papers Public. Here’s Why and How“
New appointment: I’ve recently been designated the ethics advisor for the European Commission-sponsored SPATIAL Project (Security and Privacy Accountable Technology Innovations, Algorithms, and Machine Learning)
I was recently named one of Milwaukee’s “10 People to Know in Technology” by the Milwaukee Business Journal. I was also featured in a recent “People of ACM” column.

Current Projects:

Jessica Vitak and I have received funding from the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab for our project “Ethics Education and Preparedness for AI Researchers: A Benchmarking Study.” This is part of our larger effort to study ethics preparedness across numerous research communities who deal with pervasive data.
Collaborating with a multidisciplinary team on PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research), a multi-year research project funded by a $3 million LARGE grant from the NSF to study how diverse stakeholders – big data researchers, platforms, regulators, and user communities – understand their ethical obligations and choices related to computational research that relies on big, pervasive data sets about people.
Collaborating with Yaxing Yao, Danny Huang, and Jessica Vitak on an NSF-funded project: Supporting Privacy Negotiation Among Multiple Stakeholders in Smart Environments.
Working with Dr. Jordan Smoller (Harvard) and the SmollerLab team on NIMH-funded efforts to ethically utilize machine learning methods, integrate multiple data sources, and apply natural language processing approaches for suicide risk prediction.
Curation of The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2022. We currently have over 1,400 transcript files and over 200 videos archived for researchers.
Co-editor of the “Information Society” book series at MIT Press (with Laura DeNardis).
Various other fun projects with students and other collaborators. Too many to mention, but all exciting! I also recently joined Mastodon.

Recent Talks & Activities:

Invited Speaker: “Ethics of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Public Health: Challenges and Opportunities” National Center for Ethics in Health Care, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (November 2023)
Invited Panelist: “International approaches to the legal, governance and ethical challenges of social media and digital behavioural data for researchers and research infrastructures” Royal Statistical Society Data Governance and Ethics Section (November 2023)
Attended ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW) in Minneapolis, MN and Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA (October 2023)
Moderator: “Fair and Ethical AI & Analytics: A survey of multi-disciplinary research of equity in tech & data” Equity in Tech Summit. Milwaukee, WI (October 2023)
Invited Speaker: “The Intersection of Emerging Technologies and Research Ethics: Challenges and Opportunities” Research Community Forum. OHRP/University of Michigan (September 2023)
Invited Panelist: “The Ethics of Using Public Social Media Data for Research” CARE: Conversations About Research Ethics. Ohio State University (September 2023)
Keynote: “Building Privacy and Ethics into Future Mobile Platforms” SECURENET 2023 Summit on Security and Privacy in Future Mobile Networks. Dublin, Ireland (September 2023)
Invited Attendee: Social Science Foo Camp, Facebook. Menlo Park, CA (February 2023)
Participant: “Global University Summit for the Rome Call for AI Ethics” University of Notre Dame (November 2022)
Organizer: “Data Collection for Internet Researchers under Data Protection Regimes” Invitation-only workshop co-organized with Institute of International and European Affairs and Meta, Dublin, Ireland (November 2022)
Keynote: “Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Responses: Opportunities and Risks” The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care, MSOE/MCW (September 2022)
Invited Participant: “Internet Studies Research Summit” CUNY Newmark School of Journalism, NYC (August 2022)
Invited Panelist: “Artificial Intelligence and the Consumer Marketplace” Presidential Summit of the National Association of Attorneys General. Des Moines, IA. (August 2022)
Invited Participant: Workshop on “Workshop on the Ethics of Field Experiments” Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University (July 2022)
Invited Talk: “Ethical Considerations Related to Research on Social Media Data: Conceptual Gaps & Ways Forward” Hebrew University of Jerusalem (July 2022)
Organizer: “Research Ethics in HCI: A SIGCHI Community Discussion” CHI2022 (May 2022)

**The Zuckerberg Files** is a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2022

Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda and I recently published “Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts“ with dozens of great contributors. A cc-licensed PDF is available here.

Recent Publications:

Fiesler, C., Zimmer, M., Proferes, N., Gilbert, S., & Jones, N. (2024). Remember the Human: A Systematic Review of Ethical Considerations in Reddit Research. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(GROUP), 1-33.
Lenhart, A., Park, S., Zimmer, M., & Vitak, J. (2023). “You Shouldn’t Need to Share Your Data”: Perceived Privacy Risks and Mitigation Strategies Among Privacy-Conscious Smart Home Power Users. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW2), 1–34.
Park, S., Lenhart, A., Zimmer, M., & Vitak, J. (2023). “Nobody’s Happy”: Design Insights from Privacy-Conscious Smart Home Power Users on Enhancing Data Transparency, Visibility, and Control. Nineteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2023), 543–558.
Vitak, J., Kumar, P., Liao, Y., & Zimmer, M. (2023). Boundary Regulation Processes and Privacy Concerns With (Non-)Use of Voice-Based Assistants. Human-Machine Communication, 6, 183–201.
Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2023). Surveillance and the future of work: Exploring employees’ attitudes toward monitoring in a post-COVID workplace. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 28(4).
Ajmani, L. H., Chancellor, S., Mehta, B., Fiesler, C., Zimmer, M., & De Choudhury, M. (2023). A Systematic Review of Ethics Disclosures in Predictive Mental Health Research. 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1311–1323.
Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2023). Power, Stress, and Uncertainty: Experiences with and Attitudes toward Workplace Surveillance During a Pandemic. Surveillance & Society, 21(1), 29–44.
Vitak, J., Liao, Y., Mols, A., Trottier, D., Zimmer, M., Kumar, P., & Pridmore, J. (2023). When Do Data Collection and Use Become a Matter of Concern? A Cross-Cultural Comparison of U.S. and Dutch Privacy Attitudes. International Journal Of Communication, 17, 471-498.
Pater, J., Fiesler, C., & Zimmer, M. (2022). No Humans Here: Ethical Speculation on Public Data, Unintended Consequences, and the Limits of Institutional Review. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(GROUP), 1-13. [Honorable Mention: Best Paper Award]
Zimmer, M. and Logan, S. (2021), Privacy concerns with using public data for suicide risk prediction algorithms: a public opinion survey of contextual appropriateness, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society.
Shilton, K., Moss, E., Gilbert, S. A., Bietz, M. J., Fiesler, C., Metcalf, J., Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2021). Excavating awareness and power in data science: A manifesto for trustworthy pervasive data research. Big Data & Society.
Proferes, N., Jones, N., Gilbert, S., Fiesler, C., & Zimmer, M. (2021). Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics. Social Media + Society.
Reuter, K., Deodhar, A., Makri, S., Zimmer, M., Berenbaum, F., Nikiphorou, xE. (2021). COVID-19 pandemic impact on people with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases: Insights from patient-generated health data on social media. Rheumatology.
Buchanan, E.A., & Zimmer, M. (2021). Internet research ethics (revised). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Hargittai, E., Redmiles, E. M., Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2020). Americans’ willingness to adopt a COVID-19 tracking app. First Monday, 25(11).
Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2020). More Than Just Privacy: Using Contextual Integrity to Evaluate the Long-Term Risks from COVID-19 Surveillance Technologies. Social Media + Society.
Wu, P., Vitak, J., & Zimmer, M. (2020). A Contextual Approach to Information Privacy Research. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 71(4). 485-490.
Zimmer, M., Kumar, P., Vitak, J., Liao, Y., & Chamberlain Kritikos, K. (2020). ‘There’s Nothing Really They Can Do with This Information’: Unpacking How Users Manage Privacy Boundaries for Personal Fitness Information. Information, Communication & Society 23(7), 1020–1037.
Chu, K. H., Colditz, J., Sidani, J., Zimmer, M., & Primack, B. (2019). Re-evaluating standards of human subjects protection for sensitive health data in social media networks. Social Networks.
Reuter ,K., Zhu, Y., Angyan, P., Le, N., Merchant, A., Zimmer, M. (2019). Public Concern About Monitoring Twitter Users and Their Conversations to Recruit for Clinical Trials: Survey Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(10). [Winner: Best Paper for International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook of Medical Informatics, Section on Consumer Health Informatics and Education]
Pridmore, J., Zimmer, M., Vitak, J., Mols, A., Trottier, D., Kumar, P., & Liao, Y. (2019). Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households. Surveillance & Society, 17(1/2), 125-131.
Liao, Y., Vitak, J., Kumar, P., Zimmer, M., & Kritikos, K. (2019). Understanding the Role of Privacy and Trust in Intelligent Personal Assistant Adoption. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual iConference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (iConference) (pp. 102-113). [Winner: Lee Dirks Best Paper Award]