Ethics of Secrecy

Call for Papers for Vol. 17 (07/2012)

• Deadline for extended abstracts: January 15, 2012
• Notification of acceptance to authors: February 29, 2012
• Deadline for full articles: May 1, 2012
• Deadline for revised articles: June 15, 2012
• Publication: July 2012

The concept of “secrecy” is bound up in a variety of aspects of information ethics, sometimes in con-flicting ways: respecting personal privacy and opposing undue surveillance ensures a certain level of secrecy in one’s personal life and activities; to ensure security and public safety, government secrecy is often justifiable; open records laws and whistleblower protections are meant to limit government secrecy and promote transparency; corporate trade secrets remain secret to protect investments and economic growth; the secrecy of our personal lives is increasingly shattered – and commodified – through social media or, to paint a black picture: the personal freedom to conceal and reveal information and thus even the concept of personal identity might be at stake.

This special issue will explore the complex nature of “secrecy” in our contemporary information society. The ethical exploration of secrecy must be renewed in the face of the multiple and shifting social, political and cultural contexts in which information and people flow.

We welcome papers analyzing ethical problems of online social networks such as:

• Privacy, reputation, and the secrecy of personal information
• Tensions between secrecy and transparency
• Corporate secrecy and the ethics of whistleblowing
• The value of secrecy in a social information ecosystem
• The ethics of secrecy across cultures and societies
• Secrecy, transparency, privacy: moral principles of democracy?
• Government secrecy and the ethics of WikiLeaks
• Privacy and secrecy in ethical and sociological discussion
• The “interplay” between secrecy and mass/social media
• Privacy and secrecy in the discussion of communication science
• …

Guest Editors:

Daniel Nagel
Attorney
BRP Renaud & Partner
Stuttgart, Germany
daniel.nagel@brp.de

Prof. Dr. Matthias Rath
Director, Research Center Youth – Media – Education
University of Education Ludwigsburg, Germany
fjmb@ph-ludwigsburg.de

Michael Zimmer, PhD
School of Information Studies
Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
zimmerm@wum.edu

Submission guideline:

Potential authors are requested to submit an extended abstract (for details see http://www.i-r-i- e.net/about_irie.htm) by December 31, 2011. Abstracts may be submitted in the native language of the author though an English translation of this abstract must be included if the chosen language is not English. IRIE will publish articles in English, French, German, Portuguese or Spanish. The author(s) of contributions in French, Portuguese, or Spanish must nominate at least two potential peer reviewers.

Abstracts will be evaluated by the guest editors.

Deadline for the final article (usually ca. 3,000 words or 20,000 characters including blanks) is May 1, 2012. All final articles must conform to the IRIE style sheet. All full submissions will be subject to peer review. Therefore the acceptance of an extended abstract does not imply the publication of the final text, unless the article has passed the peer review and revisions (if required) have been included in the text.

All submissions should be sent by email with “IRIE-Secrecy Submission” in the header to Michael Zimmer: zimmerm@uwm.edu

I feel privileged to have my own essay, “Privacy Protection in the Next Digital Decade: ‘Trading Up’ or a ‘Race to the Bottom?”, published within the same pages as Tim Wu, Hal Varian, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, Stewart Baker, Jonathan Zittrain, Milton Mueller, Eric Goldman, and Yochai Benkler.

To learn more about the book, check out the foreword and introduction, or the table of contents. The book is available as a free PDF and the hardcover can purchased online. A free eBook will be available soon.

A free book launch symposium will follow the State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC the afternoon of January 19. Space is limited so RSVP here. (Unfortunately I cannot attend.)

I’m thrilled to announce that, after a peer review process and the hard work of David Matheson, a collection of papers from this conference has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in an edited volume, “Contours of Privacy”. From the description:

The contours of privacy—its particular forms and our reasons for valuing it—are numerous and varied. This book explores privacy’s contours in a series of essays on such themes as the relationship between privacy and social accountability, privacy in and beyond anonymity, the psychology of privacy, and the privacy concerns of emerging information technologies.

The book’s international and multidisciplinary group of contributors provides rich insights about privacy that will be of great interest not only to the scholarly privacy community at large but also to professionals, academics, and laypersons who understand that the contours of privacy weave themselves throughout wide swaths of life in present-day society.

The stylistically accessible yet scholarly rigorous nature of The Contours of Privacy, along with the diversity of perspectives it offers, set it apart as one of the most important additions to the privacy literature on the contemporary scene.

I feel privileged to have an expanded version of my original paper included in this volume: “Privacy on the Roads: Mobility, Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies, and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows”.

The full table of contents is after the fold.

Introduction
Exploring the Contours of Privacy
David Matheson……………………………………………………………………………..vii

Part I: Privacy, Anonymity and Accountability

Chapter One
Scoping Anonymity in Cases of Compelled Disclosure of Identity:
Lessons from BMG v. Doe
Ian Kerr & Alex Cameron…………………………………………………………………3

Chapter Two
Xenophon and the City without Walls
J. Hugh Hunter……………………………………………………………………………….31

Part II: Privacy In and Beyond Anonymity

Chapter Three
Context and Construction: Connecting Privacy, Anonymity
and Identity
Marsha Hanen………………………………………………………………………………..51

Chapter Four
Anonymity and Privacy: Conceptual Links and Normative
Implications
Travis Dumsday……………………………………………………………………………..71

Chapter Five
Anonymity in 12-Step Groups: An Anthropological Approach
Catarina Frois………………………………………………………………………………..85

Part III: Privacy and the Mind

Chapter Six
Privacy as Commodity: Divulgence as Diversion
Aritha van Herk……………………………………………………………………………109

Chapter Seven
Privacy and Psychology
Stephen T. Margulis……………………………………………………………………..131

Chapter Eight
Privacy, Rights, and Moral Value
Steven Davis………………………………………………………………………………..153

Part IV: Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Chapter Nine
Data Protection versus Privacy: Lessons from Facebook’s Beacon
Valerie Steeves…………………………………………………………………………….183

Chapter Ten
Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks
Ralph Gross & Alessandro Acquisti………………………………………………..197

Chapter Eleven
Privacy on the Roads: Mobility, Vehicle Safety Communication
Technologies, and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows
Michael Zimmer…………………………………………………………………………..219

Chapter Twelve
Privacy Outside the Castle: Surveillance Technologies and Reasonable
Expectations of Privacy in Canadian Judicial Reasoning
Krista Boa……………………………………………………………………………………241

Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………263

Index…………………………………………………………………………………………..265

Information Society Series: An Interdisciplinary Series on Technology, Law, and Society
Series Editors, Laura DeNardis and Michael Zimmer
MIT Press

The Information Society Series will address the social, legal, and policy implications of the Internet and new information technologies and will especially feature works from the growing global ranks of interdisciplinary scholars in information schools; communications departments; science, technology, and society programs; and programs in law, technology, and culture.

We are accepting book proposals for the series. Preference will be given to monographs rather than edited volumes and books that are interdisciplinary, normative, and global in scope. Book proposals should include:

1. a prospectus (brief description, outstanding features and uniqueness of work, audience and market considerations, status of book, and recommended reviewers);
2. a detailed table of contents;
3. sample chapters; and
4. the authors curriculum vitae.

Please submit completed proposals to denardis@american.edu and zimmerm@uwm.edu.

Current books in the series include:

• Interfaces on Trial 2.0, by Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
• Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability, edited by Laura DeNardis
• The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World, edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey

The result of our efforts has just been published in a special issue of the International Review of Information Ethics focusing on the convergence between business and moral intelligence. Here’s the title and abstract:

Values and Pragmatic Action: The Challenges of Introducing Ethical Intelligence in Technical Design Communities
by Noëmi Manders-Huits and Michael Zimmer

Various Value-Conscious Design frameworks have recently emerged to introduce moral and ethical intelligence into business and technical design contexts, with the goal of proactively influencing the design of technologies to account for moral and ethical values during the conception and design process. Two attempts to insert ethical intelligence into technical design communities to influence the design of technologies in ethical- and value-conscious ways are described, revealing discouraging results. Learning from these failed attempts, the article identifies three key challenges of pragmatic engagement with technical design communities: (1) confronting competing values; (2) identifying the role of the values advocate; and (3) the justification of a value framework. Addressing these challenges must become a priority if one is to be successful in pragmatically engaging with real-world business and design contexts to bring moral and ethical intelligence to bear in the design of emerging information and communication technologies.

You can download the entire special issue here (pdf).

The open question in much of this privacy advocacy is what do consumers actually know about possible threats to their privacy, how much do they care, and how do they act on any concerns that arise?

To help understand and address these questions, the Journal of Consumer Affairs is publishing a special issue on”Privacy Literacy — How Consumers Understand and Protect Their Privacy.” From the CFP:

Consumers increasingly confront a wide array of privacy-related information and are called upon to make decisions impacting their privacy in a growing number of arenas and contexts. Existing research suggests that many consumers do not understand the decisions they are forced to make nor the impact of those decisions. For this special issue of the Journal of Consumer Affairs, manuscripts are being solicited devoted to the effects of privacy literacy on consumer welfare. The goal of this special issue is to extend our theoretical and practical knowledge of how consumers obtain, process, and use information and mechanisms that relate to their privacy. We seek contributions from multiple disciplines including communications, consumer education, economics, finance, law, public policy, psychology and marketing. Authors may submit empirical studies or conceptual work. Papers that are theoretically grounded and also contain significant implications for consumer welfare are especially appropriate.

Topics that would be appropriate for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Consumer understanding of privacy and privacy-related information
• The interplay between privacy knowledge and consumer behavior
• Cost assessments for the surrender of personal information
• Tradeoffs between the surrender of private information and online access
• Deceptive or covert practices in information exchange
• Measurement and assessment of privacy literacy
• Legal and regulatory issues in privacy
• How consumers respond to solicitations for private information
• Consumer understanding of privacy certifications, trustmarks, and seals of approval
• Methods to improve privacy literacy
• The privacy literacy of vulnerable consumers (e.g., children, low-income, etc.)
• Relationships between desire-for-privacy, privacy concern, trust, and privacy knowledge
• Disclosure versus practice regarding privacy-related behaviors
• Consumer awareness regarding seller use of private information
• Consumer understanding of medical and financial privacy practices and disclosures

Submission Information
Manuscripts are due by June 1, 2008. Please follow the submission guidelines for The Journal of Consumer Affairs as detailed under “JCA Author Guidelines” on the Blackwell Publishing web site (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/submit.asp?ref=0022-0078&site=1). Authors wishing to submit a manuscript should send two (2) electronic copies of their manuscript (one with the full title page and one copy cleaned of all information that identifies the authors) to the special issue co-editor

[via PogoWasRight]

This special issue was born from a panel I organized at AoIR, and features amazing contributions from Trebor Scholz, Matthew Allen, Kylie Jarrett, Søren Mørk Petersen, myself, Anders Albrechtslund, and David Silver.

My thanks to everyone who helped make this special issue a reality.

First Monday
Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008

Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
edited by Michael Zimmer

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
by Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
by Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
by Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
by Søren Mørk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
by Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward
by David Silver

Co-edited with Amanda Spink, Web Search is a collection of chapters approaching Web search engines from philosophical, cultural, critical, legal, economic, historical, political, and information scientific perspectives.

The official description from Springer:

Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual’s everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities.

This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas. It examines the various roles and impacts of Web searching on the social, cultural, political, legal, and informational spheres of our lives, such as the impact on individuals, social groups, modern and postmodern ways of knowing, and public and private life. By critically examining the issues, theories, and formations arising from, and surrounding, Web searching, this book represents an important contribution to the emerging multidisciplinary body of research on Web search engines.

The new ideas and novel perspectives gathered in this volume will prove valuable for research and curricula in social sciences, communication studies, cultural studies, information science, and related disciplines.

The table of contents features many of the leading scholars on Web search engines from across the globe:

Part I: Introduction

• Introduction (Amanda Spink and Michael Zimmer)

Part II: Social, Cultural, and Philosophical Perspectives

• Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design (Alejandro Diaz)
• Reconsidering the Rhizome: A Textual Analysis of Web Search Engines as Gatekeepers of the Internet (Aaron Hess)
• Exploring Gendered Notions: Gender, Job Hunting and Web Searches (Rosa Mikeal Martey)
• Searching Ethics: The Role of Search Engines in the Construction and Distribution of Knowledge (Lawrence Hinman)
• The Gaze of the Perfect Search Engine: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance (Michael Zimmer)

Part III: Political, Legal, and Economic Perspectives

• Search Engine Liability for Copyright Infringement (Brian Fitzgerald, Damien O’Brien, and Anne Fitzgerald)
• Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine (Eric Goldman)
• The Democratizing Effects of Search Engine Use: On Chance Exposures and Organizational Hubs (Azi Lev-On)
• ‘Googling’ Terrorists: Are Northern Irish Terrorists Visible on Internet Search Engines? (Paul Reilly)
• The History of the Internet Search Engine: Navigational Media and the Traffic (Elizabeth Van Couvering)

Part IV: Information Behavior Perspectives

• Toward a Web Search Information Behavior Model (Shirlee Ann Knight and Amanda Spink)
• Web Searching for Health: Theoretical Foundations and Connections to Health Related Outcomes (Mohan Dutta and Graham. Bodie)
• Search Engines and Expertise about Global Issues: Well-defined Landscape or Undomesticated Wilderness? (Jenny Fry, Shefali Virkar, and Ralph Schroeder)
• Conceptual Models for Search (David Hendry and Efthimis Efthimiadis)
• Web Searching: A Quality Measurement Perspective (Dirk Lewandowski and Nadine Höchstötter)

Part V: Conclusion

• Conclusions and Further Research (Amanda Spink and Michael Zimmer)

More details on Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives are available at Springer, Amazon, and WorldCat.

For those interested in understanding the fundamental differences between the US and EU approaches to data privacy protection, and how these differences are negotiated in policy and practice, I suggest reading The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective, by Colin Bennett and Charles Raab, and Negotiating Privacy: The European Union, the United States, and Personal Data Protection, by Dorothee Heisenberg.

I recently reviewed these two insightful books, and the essay appears in the latest issue of The Information Society. For those with institutional access, the review can be downloaded here. Following are the essay’s introductory paragraphs:

Privacy Protection in the Network Society: “Trading Up” or a “Race to the Bottom”?

Apparent to most citizens of contemporary, industrialized society, people no longer exist and live in fixed locations and spaces. Instead people are on the move in their personal, professional, intellectual, and social spheres. Within and across these spheres, mobility, rather than permanence, is likely to be the norm. Manuel Castells (1996) captures this feature of modern life in his theory of the space of flows, arguing that “our society is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols” (p. 412). These flows – particularly information flows – constitute what Castells describes as the “network society,” where “networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture” (p. 469).

By providing new linkages and spaces for information flows, the network society has also emerged as a potent infrastructure for the flow of personal information, and, as a result, both privacy and surveillance capitalize on this new world of flows. While varied in focus, the two books discussed in this review, The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective, by Colin Bennett and Charles Raab, and Negotiating Privacy: The European Union, the United States, and Personal Data Protection, by Dorothee Heisenberg, share Castell’s identification of personal information flows as a key factor in our network society’s “processes of production, experience, power and culture,” and together they provide clarity to the complicated terrain of trans-national policies for the protection – or preservation – of these personal data flows across the network.

While still in its infancy compared to the knowledge tools that preceded it, the impact of Web search engines on society and culture has already received considerable attention from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Consistent with most other areas of Internet research, interest in Web search engines as a research topic crosses multiple disciplines, ranging from the quite technical areas of computer and information sciences, into both the social sciences, law and the humanities, providing a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the significance of these contemporary knowledge tools. I suggest the term “Web search studies” as a means to collect these diverse studies of Web search engines into a cohesive domain of academic interest. This chapter will provide a review of major contributions from the interdisciplinary field of Web search studies, broken down into five main categories: technical foundations and evaluations; transaction log analyses; user studies; political, ethical, and cultural critiques; and legal and policy analyses.

Why do we need a field of “Web search studies”? As far as I can tell, no one has suggested the need for such a term (most uses of the phrase seem to be about “studies” of “web search” activities rather than my intended usage). Yet, just as media studies has its sub-fields of audience studies, television studies, film studies, and the like, it seems appropriate for Internet studies to embrace web search studies as a unique domain under its larger umbrella.

I will try to work on a broader thought piece in support of this proposal, but I welcome any reactions.

:: UPDATE: The book has been published, and my chapter can be found here.