Michael Zimmer.org

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is pleased to announce its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2010 Annual Meeting, which will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 22-27, 2010. (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM10/am10cfp.html)
Building from the overall conference theme, the theme for this year’s paper contest is: “Navigating Streams in a Global Information Ecosystem“.
Papers could discuss issues, policies and case studies on specific aspects of the theme from a global and/or international perspective. Topics include, but are …

For those nearby, I’ll be the featured speaker at the Pub Politico gathering on Sunday, March 21, 2:00pm at Brocach Irish Pub in Madison, Wisconsin.
I’ll be speaking, informally, about “Failures in Self-Regulation in Online Privacy”, focusing on recent examples of how Google, Facebook, and other online companies continue to fall short in their attempts to protect user privacy, and whether/how the government should step in to provide additional protections for consumers of online services.
The gathering is co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and is free and open …

From May 2 through May 8, 2010, libraries across the nation will celebrate Choose Privacy Week for the first time. This American Library Association campaign invites library professionals, users, and friends into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. The UWM School of Information Studies and UWM Libraries have joined together to provide a venue for local librarians, information professionals, and patrons to discuss the emerging privacy and ethical challenges for libraries in the new “2.0” era, titled:
Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 …

Special Topics in Information Science – The Search Engine Society:

Search engines have become the center of gravity of our contemporary information society, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the World Wide Web and beyond. The audacious mission of Google, for example, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Attaining such a goal necessarily results in significant changes to the ways in which information is created, stored, retrieved, and used. This course will critically examine the nature of search engines and their role in our information society, and reveal the unique challenges they bring to bear on information institutions, information policy, and information ethics.

This weekend I’m attending the 4th Access to Knowledge conference, A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights, hosted by the Yale Information Society Project (see my original post on the conference here).

With the help of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies, I organized a workshop on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities foran African Information Ethics”, featuring Johannes Britz (School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee), Rafael Capurro (International Center for Information Ethics, and School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee) and Dennis Ocholla (University of Zululand), along with a very engaged group of conference participants.

Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from some 215 million public Facebook profile pages.
According to Warden, he exploited a flaw in Facebook’s architecture to access public profiles without needing to be signed in to a Facebook account, effectively avoiding being bound by Facebook’s Terms of Service preventing such automated harvesting of data. As a result, he amassed …

While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects. Many in the room felt that consent was not necessary since the tweets are public, a conscious choice made by the user to allow the whole world see her activity. In short, by not restricting …

I’m currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010.
This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers for this workshop, it should be an excellent experience. I’ve submitted a brief analysis of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset release (my larger paper is going through its final edits for publication). You can download the short analysis here: Subject Privacy and the Release of the “Tastes, …

To celebrate Data Privacy Day, Google has published its 5 guiding privacy principles. The principles are something every organization should commit to and strive for. The problem is, Google hasn’t adhered to them quite as closely as they’d want you to believe….

January 28, 2010 is Data Privacy Day. To celebrate, MichaelZimmer.org no longer uses any services that rely on web cookies or web bugs…

I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook”. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared”, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

Microsoft has fired a new salvo into the search privacy wars, announcing it will delete IP addresses from the Bing search engine logs after 6 months.

Microsoft has decided to take the lead in search privacy and agree to the European Union’s demand that data retention be cut to six months. Previously, Microsoft de-identified its search logs immediately, but didn’t purge the IP address until 18 months. Now, de-identification still takes place immediately, and the IP addresses are completely removed in 6 months.

Responding to the brouhaha caused by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that social norms on privacy have loosened, Michael Arrington (the tech blogger who was interviewing Zuckerberg at the time) has posted a piece on his blog Tech Crunch: “Ok You Luddites, Time To Chill Out On Facebook Over Privacy”
Arrington is correct that Zuckerberg never actually said that “the age of privacy is over”, and that off-line data aggregation companies like Equifax and TransUnion have been eroding privacy long before Facebook existed. However, just as Zuckerberg is wrong in …

There’s been quite a dust-up regarding Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that social norms on privacy have changed, and that Facebook is merely reacting to these shifting norms.

Lots has already been said about Zuckerberg’s remarks, so I’m only going to add three thoughts to the conversation: What Zuckerberg said isn’t surprising, it isn’t new, and it isn’t true…

[UPDATE: As of Jan 7, 2010, Google has now changed its homepage so the Nexus One ad fades in with the other content -- more below]
Remember how hard we gad to fight to convince Google to include a link to its privacy policy on the Google.com homepage?
Remember how Google argued “we do believe that having very limited text on our home page is important” and that it was pitched as some great sacrifice to include the word “privacy” and disrupt the homepage’s aesthetics?
Remember how, just a month ago, Google argued …