Speaking of conferences in November that I am unable to attend, Geert Lovink and Shirley Niemans at the Institute of Network Cultures have organized the Society of the Query conference, November 13-14 in Amsterdam. With the tagline "Stop Searching, Start…
Read More Society of the Query conference: Stop Searching, Start Questioning!
When I edited a special volume of First Monday on "Critical Perspectives of Web 2.0" I was lucky to have included a contribution by Trebor Scholz, which made an already good collection of papers even better. Scholz's article, "Market Ideology…
Read More The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor
Helen Nissenbaum and others on the PORTIA and PRESIDIO projects have released a white paper describing Privads, a client-side behavioral advertising system designed to protect users' privacy: Online behavioral advertising (OBA) refers to the practice of tracking users across web…
Next week, October 19 – 23, 2009, will mark the first international Open Access Week, celebrating the international movement working to "throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge." Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of scholarly and scientific research, the…
For the last 353 days, I've been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an…
Read More IR.10 Internet: Critical (or, why the blog has been slow lately)
Today is the start of Banned Books Week 2009, the 28th annual celebration of the freedom to choose what we read, as well as the freedom to select from a full array of possibilities. Hundreds of books are challenged in…
The proposed Google Book Search Settlement Agreement has been the target of numerous criticisms, not the least of which has been its incredible impact on -- and incredible silence about -- users' intellectual privacy. After pressure by the FTC and advocacy groups, Google published a Privacy Policy for Google Books. In announcing the publication of this privacy policy, Google notes that "Google Books has always been covered by the general Privacy Policy for all of Google's services". Unfortunately, the fact that Google repeats that Google Books will follow the same privacy policy of general Web searching means the norms of data collection of the Web will likely prevail over the norms of the library. All the reasons we are concerned about the privacy of our Web searches are now amplified with the possible emergence of a large-scale infrastructure to track and monitor book searches.
Dr. Pamela Samuelson has been one of the most vocal, and most intelligent, critics of the proposed Google Book Search settlement agreement. She has written, for example, on how the settlement threatens orphan works and represents a "major restructuring of…
Read More An Objection to the Google Book Settlement by Academic Authors
Recently, the EFF released a report named "On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever", introducing some of the basic threats to locational privacy: Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people's movements…
In the wake of the ongoing controversy over select Young Adult books at the West Bend Community Memorial Library, the Intellectual Freedom Round Table of the Wisconsin Library Association has named Director Michael Tyree and Young Adult Librarian Kristin Pekoll,…
Read More West Bend Public Library Wins Wisconsin ProQuest Intellectual Freedom Award
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