MichaelZimmer.org

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

Recognized globally as an expert in data, AI, and internet research ethics, Dr. Zimmer’s work is used by researchers, ethics bodies, and government & industry partners worldwide, and he serves on multiple ethics committees and advisory boards.

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.

Check out the Marquette Center for Data, Ethics, and Society, where scholars, students, and community partners explore the social and ethical dimensions of data, technology, and, and artificial intelligence.

Latest:

The SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee has launched a quarterly column in the SIGCHI newsletter, with short essays written by Casey Fiesler, Jessica Vitak, and me. The first three are here, here, and here. (December 2025)
Excited to see our paper on “Web scraping for research: Legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific considerations” finally published in Big Data & Society. This was a big interdisciplinary effort led by Megan Brown, along with Andrew Gruen, Gabe Madoff, Sol Messing, and Zeve Sanderson. (November 2025)
I worked with Eli Asikin-Garmager, Leila Zia, and Cameran Ashraf at the Wikimedia Foundation to publish a whitepaper on “Privacy in Public: Navigating Research, Personal Data, and Safety on Wikipedia“, and we have a blog post summarizing our recommendations for Wikipedia researchers & users here. (November 2025)
Published a major update to the “Internet Research Ethics” entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Elizabeth Buchanan and I first published this article in 2012. (July 2025)
I am honored to have been appointed to the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, where I will contribute to shaping strategic directions for computing research and advancing its impact on science, technology, and society. (June 2025)
I’ve been appointed to the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE), which promotes ethical conduct among computing professionals and advances awareness of the ACM Code of Ethics. (April 2025)
I have been awarded a Way Klingler Fellowship from Marquette University to support my project “Data Ethics through Discernment,” which aims to develop an innovative conceptual and pedagogical framework for addressing challenges in data ethics through the Jesuit principle of discernment. (April 2025)

Ongoing Projects:

Collaborating with Jessica Vitak and Casey Fiesler a new NSF grant through the Ethical & Responsible Research (ER2) program to continue the work started by the PERVADE Project. “Developing Educational Resources for the Ethical Use of Pervasive Data” is a 3-year collaborative project that will enhance research ethics education by creating innovative teaching materials based on case studies and interactive modules. Details here.
Collaborating with Yaxing Yao, Danny Huang, and Jessica Vitak on an NSF-funded project: Supporting Privacy Negotiation Among Multiple Stakeholders in Smart Environments.
Co-chair of the Association of Internet Researchers’ Ethics Working Committee, where I am leading a global, community-based effort to update the Internet Research Ethics Guidelines (IRE 3.0). This project aims to address emerging technologies, methods, and contexts shaping digital research and to ensure the guidelines remain responsive to evolving ethical challenges for internet researchers.
Curation of The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2025. We currently have over 1,700 transcript files and 300 videos archived for researchers.
Co-editor of the “Information Society” book series at MIT Press (with Laura DeNardis).

Recent Activities:

Invited participant: Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Visioning Workshop, Washington, DC. (December 2025)
Panel organizer: “AoIR Ethics in Action: Guidelines, Regulations, and Practices Across Diverse Global Communities” 2025 Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (October 2025)
Organizer: AI Ethics Symposium – From Policy to Practice. With Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute. Marquette University (November 2024)
Invited participant: Operationalizing Ethics into Online Safety and AI Research Workshop, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington D.C. (October 2024)
Presentation: “Considering the Ethics of Integrating “Derogatory Data” in Clinical Suicide Prediction Algorithms: A Contextual Integrity Assessment” 6th Annual Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity, Rutgers University (September 2024)
Keynote: “Data Ethics Through Discernment? A Possible Approach to Ethics of AI” SPATIAL: Guiding Light in the AI Landscape, TU Delft (July 2024)
Invited Speaker: “Data Ethics and Digital Mental Health Interventions: Opportunities & Gaps” Webinar – Brief Mental Health Interventions for Suicide Risk. Center for Suicide Research and Prevention (CSRP) (June 2024)
Keynote: “Ethics of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Medical Research: Challenges and Opportunities” IRB Education Retreat, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, New York, NY (May 2024)
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)
Invited Speaker: “The Intersection of Emerging Technologies and Research Ethics: Challenges and Opportunities” Research Community Forum. OHRP/University of Michigan (September 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 Panelist: “Artificial Intelligence and the Consumer Marketplace” Presidential Summit of the National Association of Attorneys General. Des Moines, IA. (August 2022)

**The Zuckerberg Files** is a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2025

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:

Brown, M. A., Gruen, A., Maldoff, G., Messing, S., Sanderson, Z., & Zimmer, M. (2025). Web scraping for research: Legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific considerations. Big Data & Society, 12(4).
Park, S., Nellore, N., Zimmer, M., & Vitak, J. (2025). In Search of “a Way to Level the Playing Field”: Helping Incidental Users Navigate Privacy Risks in Smart Environments. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), 1–28.
Nellore, N., Mishra, T., & Zimmer, M. (2024). Unveiling User Perspectives: Exploring Themes in Femtech Mobile App Reviews for Enhanced Usability and Privacy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(MHCI), 1-21.
Kumar, P. C., Zimmer, M., & Vitak, J. (2024). A Roadmap for Applying the Contextual Integrity Framework in Qualitative Privacy Research. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW).
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. [Honorable Mention: Best Paper Award]
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]