I have a summer research opportunity for an incoming UW-Milwaukee freshman interested in libraries, Web 2.0, and information ethics and policy. The Office of Undergraduate Research is again sponsoring the UR@UWM Summer Research program. Selected students are invited to campus…
Read More Research Opportunities for Incoming UW-Milwaukee Freshmen
If you have an interest in information ethics, access to knowledge, capacity building, and the African continent, please join us for the “Teaching Information Ethics in Africa – Current Status, Opportunities, and Challenges” conference at the University of Botswana on…
Read More Conference: Teaching Information Ethics in Africa (Botswana, Sept. 2010)
I am pleased to announce that I've joined a diverse coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and fellow academics in an effort to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to better reflect the realities of modern communication…
Read More Digital Due Process: Modernizing Surveillance Laws for the Internet Age
Facebook recently announced a variety of proposed changes to its Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The changes to these governing documents point to the following matters, each with its own unique privacy implications: hints of a new location-based service, clarifying that sharing with "Everyone" means everyone, and, most notably, that Facebook may share your visible data directly with certain third party websites. This final point has gotten significant attention, but would like to point out a few aspects of Facebook's new language that reveals -- yet again -- that Facebook simply fails to understand the nature of privacy, especially in our online information ecosystem.
Starting today, users visiting Google.cn will be redirected to Google.com.hk, Google’s Hong Kong search portal, where search results will be provided free from the filtering Google had previously been performing on Google.cn. Google is touting this as ending censorship in China, but, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has pointed out, that really isn’t the case. It’s an end-around. A slight-of-hand. While Google is trying to do the right thing here, and it hopes it can deliver unfiltered results to China from Google.com.hk (or force China to take some kind of action against the Hong Kong site). But I fear this move will instead result in further failure to serve the interests of Chinese Internet users, and another lost opportunity to fight oppressive online censorship.
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…
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…
Read More Pub Politico talk in Madison: Failures in Self-Regulation in Online Privacy
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…
Read More Event: Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 Era
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 for an 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.
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