ALA conducting new survey about librarians and privacy

For Immediate Release
Tue, 12/13/2011 – 15:50

Contact: Barbara Jones
Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF)

CHICAGO – The American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is inviting librarians and library workers across the country to participate in a survey that will measure librarians’ attitudes about privacy rights and protecting library users’ privacy.

The survey is available online, and takes only 15 minutes to complete. All responses are anonymous and confidential:

http://tinyurl.com/ALAprivacysurvey

The survey, which builds on an earlier 2008 survey assessing librarians’ attitudes about privacy both within and outside of the library, will provide important data that will help ALA assess the state of privacy in the United States and help guide OIF’s planning for “Privacy for All,” ALA’s ongoing campaign to engage librarians in public education and advocacy to advance privacy rights.  The survey will be available until March 1, 2012.

The study is funded by a generous grant from the Open Society Institute and is managed by Dr. Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies and co-director of its Center for Information Policy Research.

Barbara Jones, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, encouraged all librarians and library workers to take the survey.  “After three successful years working on Choose Privacy Week and related educational programs, it is essential that we test our assumptions for the remaining years of the grant,” she said.  “We want ‘Privacy for All’ to create models for programming and services that librarians can use for various constituencies and community groups.  We can’t do that without your opinions.”

The “Privacy for All” initiative features Choose Privacy Week, an annual event that encourages libraries and librarians to engage library users in a conversation about privacy; and a website, privacyrevolution.org, that provides access to privacy-related news, information and programming resources.  In 2011 – 2012, “Privacy for All” and Choose Privacy Week will be focused on the topic of government surveillance, with an emphasis on immigrant and refugee communities’ use of libraries and youth attitudes about privacy.

Visit www.privacyrevolution.org to learn more about Choose Privacy Week and the resources available to help libraries engage their users in a conversation on privacy.

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

On the opening morning of the conference, I will join John Palfrey and Lydia Shrier for a plenary panel on “Would Margaret Mead Have Blogged? How Social Media has Changed Research”. My slides for that presentation are provided below. I will also be leading a workshop on “Research, the Cloud, and the IRB”, and giving a presentation to the U.S. Department of Energy Human Subjects Working Group.

Internet research ethics is well represented at this year’s AER conference, with a strong track focusing on “Research Involving the Internet & Social Networking”. Among these presentations and workshops are several led by Elizabeth Buchanan. Buchanan will be co-facilitating a pre-conference workshop entitled “What a Tangled Web We Weave: Ethical, Regulatory, and technical Aspects of Internet Research”. She is also participating in the following workshops:  “Research, the Internet, and the IRB: Ethical and Regulatory Issues,” “Research, Social Media and the IRB,” and “Ethical Implications of Pre and Post Enrollment uses of Social Media in Clinical Trials”.

It is a well-written article, quite balanced, and features myself, the T3 principle researcher Jason Kaufman, and fellow Internet research experts Alex Halavais, Fred Stutzman, and Elizabeth Buchanan (I am friends with the latter three, for disclosure). The Chronicle also tracked down a Harvard student presumably within the dataset.

For those looking, my initial blog posts (from 2008) regarding the T3 dataset are here and here, and my full treatment of the dataset release was published here:

• Zimmer, M. (2010). “‘But the data is already public’: on the ethics of research in Facebook,” Ethics & Information Technology, 12(4), 313-325

I don’t want to rehash the entire article or episode, but would like to provide a few annotations:

The article does a nice job pointing out the dual challenges of “Researchers [who] must navigate the shifting privacy standards of social networks and their users”, as well as the “the committees set up to protect research subjects—institutional review boards, or IRB’s—[who] lack experience with Web-based research.”

These are critical revelations that we cannot take lightly. There is much work to be done to ensure researchers of all disciplines and levels recognize and respond to the complexities of engaging in this kind of research online, and that IRBs are sufficiently trained to recognize issues related to Internet research ethics.

To these ends, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has published an ethics guide (now undergoing revisions) as “as at least a starting point for their inquiries and reflection”, and we’ve held various workshops on the subject. Elizabeth Buchanan and Charles Ess have spearheaded important research on the IRBs’ awareness of Internet-related concerns, and have launched the Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center and Commons website as a valuable resource.

And, specific to the article’s mention that I have “pointed to the Harvard case in urging the federal government to do more to educate IRB’s about Web research”, I was privileged to present before the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), part of the Office for Human Research Protections in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Joined by Elizabeth Buchanan, Montana Miller, and John Palfrey (of Harvard’s Berkman Center, by the way), we discussed emerging ethical issues with Internet-based research and urged the committee to take steps to ensure IRBs and researchers were suitably trained to recognize and address these important ethical issues.

In the context of this entire debate (and some of the original comments left on my blog posts), this passage from the article is quite telling:

But Mr. Kaufman talks openly about another controversial piece of his data gathering: Students were not informed of it. He discussed this with the institutional review board. Alerting students risked “frightening people unnecessarily,” he says.

“We all agreed that it was not necessary, either legally or ethically,” Mr. Kaufman says.

Frankly, I’m troubled by this statement. I will leave it to legal experts to determine if the research violated the consent requirements of the Federal Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), but from an ethical standpoint, I argue the researchers did have an obligation to respect the intentions of those students who might have restricted their Facebook profiles to only be visible to members of the Harvard community. The researcher’s own codebook acknowledged that the assistants used to access the profile data might have had preferential access to a profile, and that “a given student’s information should not be considered objectively ‘public’ or ‘private’”. This realization should have triggered an ethical concern over whether each students truly intended to have their profile data publicly visible and accessible for downloading.

This is the crux of the issue, and my earlier attempts to learn if and how this apparent waiver of the consent requirement was deliberated by Harvard’s IRB were unsuccessful. Perhaps now we can gain a bit more understanding of why it was deemed that consent wasn’t necessary (and I hope it was a more nuanced decision than simply avoiding “frightening people unnecessarily”).

I agree with the article’s conclusion that the “biggest victim” in this episode is academic scholarship.

The uniqueness of this dataset is of obvious value for sociologists and Internet researchers, and it wasn’t my goal to shut down this research project. It is unfortunate the researchers haven’t been able to find a suitable means of re-releasing the data, but just like the AOL search data release forced us to rethink methods of anonymization before again releasing large datasets of transaction logs, I’m hopeful that this episode can prompt meaningful consideration and debate of our understandings of privacy, anonymity/identifiability, consent, and harm when it comes to Internet-based research.

Finally, I wanted to provide a brief response to the implicit accusation made in the article that I’m a part of some kind of “academic paparazzi”.

I’m not even sure what this means. Perhaps someone thinks I spend my time trolling through other people’s research hoping to find a place where they slip up so I can have a “gotcha” moment? Hardly. I had never written on research ethics until I came across this particular case. I saw a passing mention of the data release on another scholar’s blog, and the ensuing discussion there about how the presumed anonymity of the dataset should be questioned due to its unique data variables. So I started to explore, and my discoveries followed. I’m not out to get anyone, but rather have taken quite a number of proactive steps to help researchers (both the T3 team and more broadly) address these complexities.

The complexities of research ethics and methodology in today’s Internet-based environment is complex, and I’m just starting to scratch the surface. But I don’t take this lightly; I’m a scholar, not a paparazzo.

As I conclude in my full article:

The purpose of this critical analysis of the T3 project is not to place blame or single out these researchers for condemnation, but to use it as a case study to help expose the emerging challenges of engaging in research within online social network settings. …The T3 research project might very well be ushering in ‘‘a new way of doing social science’’, but it is our responsibility scholars to ensure our research methods and processes remain rooted in long- standing ethical practices. Concerns over consent, privacy and anonymity do not disappear simply because subjects participate in online social networks; rather, they become even more important.

I hope that’s the takeaway from all this.

The School of Information Studies (SOIS) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) invites applications for a full-time tenure-track position in Information Studies at the rank of Assistant, Associate or Full Professor. The selected applicant will teach courses in the School’s graduate and, possibly, undergraduate programs. A PhD and MLIS (or comparable degree) are required as is demonstrated ability in research and teaching.

Applicants should have a strong background in information policy, including, but not limited to, ethical, cultural, technological or political issues as they relate to the information professions, systems, and infrastructures that make up our global information society.

Experience or demonstrated ability in design and delivery of courses in a variety of formats, including distance learning modes, is highly desirable. The Applicant should demonstrate the ability to teach in at least one of the core areas in the SOIS MLIS program and advanced graduate elective courses in her/his areas of expertise. Opportunities will also be available to teach in the School’s Bachelor of Science program in Information Science and Technology. The Applicant should be willing to work closely with doctoral students and to serve on dissertation committees. Experienced researcher a plus. Applicants who are eligible for a senior level appointment are especially encouraged to apply.

The preferred expected start date is January, 2012, and no later than August 2012.

For full details and to apply, visit the official posting here (position #2730).

My contribution to the discussion focuses on identifying some of the unique ethical dilemmas that youth face in their information-based environments, and how some of our current literacy standards help address some of those issues. More importantly, I suggest four new strategies to help achieve ethical literacy in youth:

• Talking and listening to youth
  • Discover their unique perspectives on privacy, property, information sharing & exchange
  • Need to shape ethical lessons & examples accordingly
• Ensure ethics are integrated into all literacy-related educational activities
  • Specifically address ethical questions related to each learning outcome
  • Add ethical components to computer literacy courses, information literacy sessions, special projects
• Reach youth through information technology
  • Engage the technology, don’t build fear of it
  • Create ways to teach ethics through the active use of Facebook, Wikipedia
• Turn all information interactions into “ethical teaching moments”
  • Game nights could include discussion of cheating
  • YouTube video contests could address copyright
  • Searching Google can present lessons on bias, free speech, censorship

The slides framing my contribution can be accessed below. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

As Ars Technica summarizes:

[At] the urging of Wisconsin’s state telecommunications association, Republican legislators have introduced an omnibus bill that would sever WiscNet from the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Division of Informational Technology, and bar it from taking any money from UW.

The proposed law even goes so far as to prohibit UW from taking National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) broadband stimulus grants, or joining any entity that offers broadband to the general public.

These measures would force UW to return an estimated $39 million in such funds to Washington, DC, warned Tony Evers, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, last week. And they would force schools to turn to Badgernet, Wisconsin’s state wide-area-network, which depends heavily on AT&T as its primary vendor.

Today, individual members of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies community has joined the chorus of voices speaking out against this bill. A PDF of the letter is here, and the full text is below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Michael Zimmer, michael.zimmer@gmail.com

Dear members of the State Legislature:

As library and information science students, scholars, professionals, and educators, we are dedicated to maximizing and defending people’s free access to information and knowledge. Given this professional and ethical obligation, the undersigned individual members of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies community urge the removal of sections 23-26 in the currently pending UW System Budget Bill.

Advanced and affordable broadband Internet networking is critical to the success of students, researchers and industry statewide. Services such as WISCNET, and related consortial connectivity projects like Internet2 and EDUCAUSE, provide vital access to information for libraries, schools, historical societies, museums, hospitals and local municipalities across Wisconsin.

The “telecommunications” section of the legislation as proposed would severely limit broadband connectivity throughout the state of Wisconsin and would cut the networked information services various libraries and educational institutions provide to the citizens of the state of Wisconsin, such as Internet access, networking and collaboration, and online education and job training. It would also prohibit the UW System from being a member of Internet2 and other nonprofit consortia focusing on connectivity and information exchange, severely limiting state educators, researchers, and learners’ ability to participate in global, national and regional research and learning development in areas from Alzheimer’s prevention to astrophysics to child development.

The passage of sections 23-26 of the UW System Budget Bill would be devastating to the State. The undersigned individual members of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies community strongly urge the legislature to remove these sections form the bill, and to support WISCNET and other connectivity initiatives that provide vital access to information in support of the State’s educational and economic development.

Signed,

(Signees are writing in their personal capacity, not as representatives of UW-Milwaukee or the School of Information Studies. Titles and affiliations are for identification purposes only, and imply no institutional endorsements.)

• Liza Barry-Kessler, Doctoral Student
• Edward Benoit III, Doctoral Student
• Katie Blank, Assoc. Special Librarian
• Dave Bloom, Researcher
• Raina Bloom, Lecturer
• Amy Cooper Cary, Director, Archival Studies Program
• Karen Davies, Assistant Professor
• Alexandra Dimitroff, Associate Professor
• Melodie Fox, Doctoral Student
• Thomas Haigh, Associate Professor
• Rebecca Hall, Web Development & Marketing Coordinator
• Catherine Hansen, Lecturer & Director, Professional Development Institute
• Anthony Hoffmann, Doctoral Student
• Adam Hudson, Lecturer
• Jessica Hutchings, Graduate Advisor
• Dick Kawooya, Senior Lecturer
• Margaret Kipp, Assistant Professor
• Sharon Lake, Graduate Advisor
• Joyce M. Latham, Assistant Professor, Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research, Coordinator, Public Library Leadership Program
• Peter J Lor, Visiting Professor
• Marta Magnuson, Doctoral Student
• Jeremy Mauger, Doctoral Student
• Steven Miller, Senior Lecturer
• Robert Nunez, Web Developer & Graduate Student
• Wihelm Peekhaus, Post-doctoral Research Associate
• Nick Proferes, Doctoral Student
• Angela Sadowsky, Undergraduate Advisor
• Betsy Schoeller, Lecturer & Distance Education Coordinator
• Jim Schultz, Information Technology Specialist & Graduate Student
• James Sweetland, Professor Emeritus
• Gabriella Tato, Marketing Media Assistant
• Thomas D. Walker, Associate Professor
• Mary Wepking, Senior Lecturer & School Library Media Coordinator
• Bonnie Withers, Lecturer
• Iris Xie, Professor
• Chad Zahrt, Assistant Dean
• Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor & Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research

 

 

I presented a paper co-written with three of my esteemed colleagues, Johannes Britz, Peter Lor, and Shana Ponelis, titled “From Codification to Actualization: Applying Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to an Information-Based Rights Framework.” In this work-in-progress, we use Sen’s capability approach to reveal how personal, social, and environmental factors shape individuals’ capabilities to capitalize on their access to information and knowledge, and conclude by suggesting that information rights advocates must turn their focus from simply promoting access to fostering capabilities, which in turn will truly empower individuals to exercise and actualize their basic information rights.

All the papers and comments at this event were stimulating, but one talk in particular grabbed my attention. David Cullier, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at UofA, presented “Freedom of Information Gazebos: The Ethical Imperative for News-Library Town Squares in the Digital Age to Preserve the Communal Right to Know”, where he called on public libraries to take on a slightly new role in their communities.

Concerned that the shrinking of local news rooms and resulting lack of reporting of local news and government activities, Cullier called on libraries to be more proactive in the gathering and sharing of public records and other government information — to become freedom of information gazebos. He points out that:

Most communities have libraries, serving as a focal point for information important to citizens, often providing physical space for discussion, forums, and community meetings. Libraries are staffed by professionals expert in finding and disseminating information for citizens. Libraries also are embedded with a culture of information freedom.

To serve as true freedom of information gazebos, Cullier suggests, libraries would need to make several important changes in their culture and organizational composition. Libraries would need to be more aggressive in seeking information, actively filing freedom of information requests, and litigating for access to public records when necessary.

Local librarians should also engage in reporting and synthesizing government activities, such as attending a city council meeting, summarizing it online and posting the minutes and supporting documents. Cullier even suggested that MLIS programs should include journalism training, and libraries could even hire the reporters being laid off by newsrooms to perform this important function.

Most importantly, libraries would have to be granted greater independence from local governments, and protections would be necessary to protect libraries from retaliation, both in budgetary cuts or outright firings.

These are not modest proposals, but I really like the direction of Cullier’s thinking. Groups of activist-minded librarians, like Radical Reference, have embarked on similar efforts, but a call for more structural change in the nature of the library profession and institution might be just what is needed to help libraries maintain their central role in providing access to information.

• Intercultural & Interdisciplinary Computer Ethics
• Emerging Technology
• Philosophy of the Mind
• Ethics & Information Professionals
• Privacy & Anonymity
• Ethical Design
• Privacy and Information Warfare
• Ethical Research & Design
• Surveillance & Identity
• Conservation & Fairness

The conference also features keynotes by Toni Samek, Ph.D., Professor at the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, and a panel of distinguished international scholars:

• Rafael Capurro, Ph.D. – Director, Steinbeis-Transfer-Institut Information Ethics
• Charles Ess, Ph.D. – Professor, Department of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark.
• Luciano Floridi, Ph.D. – Research Chair in Philosophy of Information, Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire and UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics.
  Soraj Hongladarom, Ph.D. – Director, Center for Ethics of Science and Technology and associate professor of philosophy at Chulalongkorn University
• Dennis Ocholla, Ph.D. – Senior Professor, University of Zululand

CEPE/2011 will be held May 31 to June 3, 2011 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Registration is now open, and early-bird pricing is good until April 30.

CEPE is a bi-annual conference is presented by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), and is sponsored this year by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies and Center for Information Policy Research, and the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Center for Applied Ethics.

Joint LLAW/SLA Meeting
Information Ethics & WikiLeaks

When: Thursday, April 14, 2011
Where: Swig (Roasting Room), Milwaukee WI
Speaker: Professor Michael Zimmer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor & Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research UW- Milwaukee

5:30 p.m. Reception
6:00 p.m. LLAW 4th Quarterly Meeting
6:15 p.m. Dinner followed by Presentation by Professor Michael Zimmer, UWM

Please RSVP by Tues., April 5, 2011

Two ways to register:
If you belong to both LLAW & SLA, please only register with one organization.

• Online:
  Register yourself, or multiple registrants online. When applying online, you can pay with a credit card or Paypal account, or choose to pay by check.
• By Mail:
  Download a registration form to register by mail.

UPDATE: The event was great fun, and I’ve posted my slides below: