MichaelZimmer.org

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 [...]

Only a few days before the State of Missouri passed a law restricting private contact between students and teachers on social media, I was contact by UW-Milwaukee’s Department of Curriculum & Instruction to help social media guidelines for the student teachers it places in area schools. The department’s motivation was largely to ensure professionalism in [...]

In preparation for Choose Privacy Week,  the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom and American Libraries magazine hosted a webinar today, featuring the following panel of contributors: Angela Maycock, assistant director, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Michael Zimmer, PhD, assistant professor, School of Information Studies [...]

Last year, as part of Milwaukee’s 2008 OneWebDay celebration, I posted guidelines to help users adjust their Facebook privacy settings. This has been one of the most visited pages on my blog. Now that we’re getting ready for the 2009 OneWebDay event, I thought it would be prudent to update these guidelines. Updated instructions, and [...]

Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks’ ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users sharing information about themselves, their lives, and their interests. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg confirms this point [...]

A Milwaukee-area school district has enacted a policy banning communication between school staff and students on social networking Web sites and instant messaging services. According to this report, the school board seems to be concerned over the fact they can’t provide “adequate oversight” for these communication methods. Since communication between school staff and students are [...]

I recently had the pleasure and priviledge of joining Nancy Baym of the University of Kansas School of Communication Studies as a guest on Kansas City public radio’s daily current events show, “Up To Date“. The show’s topic was social networking sites, and our nearly hour-long discussion ranged what social networking sites are, how they [...]

Over the past few days I have been attending the 9th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Copenhagen. This year’s conference is “Internet Research 9.0 – Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place“, and it has been expertly organized by The IT University of Copenhagen. While I missed the first day, I was able [...]

[NOTE: This post has been updated here.] For Milwaukee’s OneWebDay celebration, we provided students instructions to help them adjust their privacy settings on Facebook. It seems that while Facebook does provide many controls for users to manage the flow of their personal information on the site, few of the students I talked with knew how [...]

Speaking of privacy on social networking sites, the Dutch 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology is holding a 2-day conference later this month on Privacy in Social Network Sites. I know the organizers of this event well, and they are asking precisely the right questions: Social Network Sites (SNS) have become the number one websites for [...]