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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 honored and thrilled to be a part of an online symposium featuring Julie Cohen‘s important new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, hosted at Concurring Opinions the week of March 5. Thanks to Danielle Citron for organizing!  Full announcement below: During the week of March 5, we’re [...]

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 [...]