Michael Zimmer.org

The 2012 edition of Choose Privacy Week, the annual initiative of the American Library Association that invites the public into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age, is wrapping up (and don’t miss our special screening of the short documentary film “Big Brother, Big Business: The Data-Mining and Surveillance Industries” tomorrow at [...]

In celebration of Choose Privacy Week, the American Library Association‘s Office for Intellectual Freedom has released preliminary findings from a new survey on “Librarian Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Informational Privacy” that I conduced on their behalf with generous support from the Open Society Foundation. The press release with preliminary results is copied below; the full report [...]

Forbes privacy columnist Kashmir Hill recently published a profile of University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor Marion Underwood‘s large-scale research project titled “The Blackberry Project.” The Blackberry Project (formerly known as the Friendship Project) is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003 (starting with 281 third and [...]

A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). [...]