I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Rafael Capurro, an international expert in information ethics, is joining the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies as a Distinguished Researcher. Dr. Capurro's focus on intercultural information ethics -- as well as his…
Read More Rafael Capurro Joining UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies
On the heels of Open Access Day at UW-Milwaukee, held as part of the first international Open Access Week, it was announced that the UWM Libraries has successfully negotiated a contract with the Elsevier publishing company that will provide increased…
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.
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
I shared my thoughts on privacy and the Google Book Settlement at the “Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access” conference organized by the UC-Berkeley School of Information. My remarks focused on my desire to trust Google when they say they're "thinking hard" about these issues and promise to "protect readers' privacy rights", while noting their track record is reason enough to cause us some pause, which is why we're pushing so hard as advocates on these vital concerns.
MichaelZimmer.org 
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