Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a privacy and internet ethics scholar, whose work focuses on digital privacy, internet research ethics, data ethics, and the broader social & ethical dimensions of emerging technologies.
Dr. Zimmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University.
Current Projects:
- Collaborating with a multidisciplinary team on PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research), a 4-year research project funded by a $3 million LARGE grant from the NSF to study how diverse stakeholders – big data researchers, platforms, regulators, and user communities – understand their ethical obligations and choices related to computational research that relies on big, pervasive data sets about people.
- Collaborating with Dr. Jessica Vitak (University of Maryland) on the SSRC Rapid-Response Grants on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences funded project “How Covid-19 Is Changing Workplace Surveillance: American Workers’ Experiences and Privacy Expectations When Working from Home“.
- Collaborating with Dr. Jessica Vitak (University of Maryland) and Drs. Jason Pridmore and Daniel Trottier (Erasmus University) on the NSF-funded project “Mapping Privacy and Surveillance Dynamics in Emerging Mobile Ecosystems: Practices and Contexts in the Netherlands and US“.
- Curation of The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2020.
- Co-editor of the “Information Society” book series at MIT Press (with Laura DeNardis).
- Various other fun projects with students and other collaborators. Too many to mention, but all exciting!
Recent Events:
- Panelist at “Algorithmic Bias: Sources and Responses“, Technology Ethics Center, University of Notre Dame (November 6, 2020)
- Workshop on “Ethics in Cybersecurity” funded by Department of Defense Cyber Scholarship Program (July-August, 2020)
- Workshop on “Data is People“ ICWSM 2020, Atlanta, GA (co-organized with Jessica Pater, Alicia Nobles, Sarah Gilbert, and Casey Fiesler) (June 8, 2020)
- AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, New York, NY (February 7-8, 2020)
Latest Publications:
- 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). [Lee Dirks Best Paper Award]
