MichaelZimmer.org

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times, in collaboration with the Chronicle of Higher Education, has published an excellent article by Marc Parry on “Big Data on Campus: Colleges Awakening to the Opportunity of Data Mining“. The article highlights the growing trend of colleges and universities of “advising by algorithm,” a Netflix-style approach to mining students’ past academic [...]

I’m thrilled to announce that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has published a new entry on “Internet Research Ethics”, written by Elizabeth Buchanan and myself. I’m confident the existence of this entry in such a popular and prestigious publication will help increase awareness of these important issues.

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 [...]

Forbes privacy columnist Kashmir Hill recently published a profile of University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor Marion Underwood’s large-scale research project titled “The Blackberry Project.”

The Blackberry Project is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003. Then, in 2009, the subjects (now entering 8th grade) were provided with BlackBerry devices with unlimited text and data plans paid for by the investigators. The devices were configured so that the content of all text messages, e-mail messages, and instant messages was saved to a secure server to be mined by the researchers — over 500,000 messages a month are being archived.

While the Blackberry Project appears to have been managed properly through the IRB rules and regulations, it highlights emerging ethical concerns with projects of this nature, including issues of consent, undue influence, and privacy & anonymity.