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It’s easy, as librarian-educators, to be overwhelmed and intimidated by the pace of technological change, as well as dismissive of the need for educating students and patrons about privacy on the assumption that they have fully embraced these technologies and likely don’t care. But the reality is that students do care about privacy, and want to be able to make informed, intentional choices about how they are known by and accessible to others.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), recently sponsored the development and publication of a series of seven Privacy Field Guides designed to offer practical information and hands-on exercises for public, academic, and K–12 librarians.
“The troublesome tech landscape is a vast and ever-evolving place,” said Callan Bignoli, library director of Olin College of Engineering. Needham, MA, kicking off an hour-long presentation on technology and surveillance—including the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic surveillance—at the American Library Association's 2021 Midwinter Virtual Meeting.
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) on February 12 introduced the Data Protection Act of 2020, new legislation that would create the Data Protection Agency, an independent federal agency that “would serve as a ‘referee’ to define, arbitrate, and enforce rules to defend the protection of [U.S. citizens’] personal data.”
Corporations, technology companies, and government entities are gathering more data than ever about people, and libraries have an important role to play in educating the public about surveillance, personal information, and online privacy, according to panelists at the Library Information Technology Association’s (LITA) Top Tech Trends panel.
Cornell University Library has put together a suite of privacy services for students and faculty. These include digital literacy workshops, confidential privacy risk consultations, public computers configured to ensure anonymity, and pro-privacy advocacy that will potentially feature a dataset of vendor policies.
Following an investigation into Santa Cruz Public Libraries’ use of Gale Analytics on Demand, a California grand jury reported on June 24 that the use of data analytics tools by libraries “is a potential threat to patron privacy and trust.”
LinkedIn Learning, which acquired Lynda.com in 2015, recently announced that all users of the platform’s online training programs will be required to create or log into a LinkedIn account to access the content. The new terms of service would also apply to LyndaLibrary users who access the platform through library subscriptions.
Librarians discussed a wide range of emerging opportunities and challenges during the Library Information Technology Association’s Top Tech Trends panel at the American Library Association’s Midwinter conference.
From January 2 through 18, the Nueces County Keach Family Library in Robstown, TX, is hosting the Glass Room Experience, a special exhibition designed to spark discussion about personal data and online privacy.
Last week, the Library Freedom Institute launched a program designed to help librarians become advocates for online privacy, created by the Library Freedom Project in partnership with New York University.
Google Analytics has a lot of configuration options, which is why webmasters love it. For the purposes of user privacy, however, there are just two configuration options to pay attention to, the “IP Anonymization” option and the “Display Features” option.
After 15 years as an elementary school classroom teacher, Fran Glick enrolled in a master’s degree program in instructional technology, with a concentration in school library media. “The moment I entered the program, my inner librarian was awakened,” she says.
The Library Information Technology Association’s (LITA) Top Tech Trends Panel, held during the American Library Association’s 2018 Midwinter conference in Denver, CO, included discussions of AI, drones, personalization and privacy, the embedding of libraries in academic learning processes, and more.
This fall New York University (NYU), in partnership with the Library Freedom Project, will be seeking applicants for the Library Freedom Institute (LFI), a new program that will train 40 geographically dispersed librarians as “Privacy Advocates.”
Recently, I was teaching a privacy class for librarians, and the topic turned to the privacy versus convenience trade-off—the occasional annoyances of using privacy-enhancing technologies online. An audience member laid out what she felt I was asking of the group. “You’re telling us to start selling granola when everyone else is running a candy store.”
The transition from print to electronic record keeping has made it easier and less expensive to store data and search for information, yet this trend has had troubling implications for individual privacy and the security of personal data, explained Mariko Hirose, staff attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) during the "Privacy Toolkit for Librarians" seminar held on March 22 at Long Island’s Farmingdale Public Library (FPL). Co-sponsored by the Greater New York Metropolitan Area chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Long Island Library Resources Council, the half-day event included presentations by Hirose and Library Freedom Project director and 2015 LJ Mover & Shaker Alison Macrina, covering topics including electronic surveillance, records subpoenas, and ways in which libraries can protect their patrons.
Before December 2014, when she stepped into the new role of San José Public Library’s (SJPL) technology and innovation project manager (now innovations manager), Erin Berman launched SJPL’s first Maker faire, which introduced 200 people to after-school STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] programs. She believes Making can empower her community and help close the digital divide. Statewide, 25 percent of Californians in 2014 lacked broadband Internet access at home, according to a Field Poll. “When someone walks into one of our libraries and says they want to learn something, we don’t just hand them a book; we hand them the tool and teach them how to use it,” Berman says.
At Library Journal and School Library Journal’s October 14 virtual conference, The Digital Shift: Libraries Connecting Communities, “Always Watched: How Being Surveilled Online Impacts Us All and What Librarians Can Do About It” , attendees were reminded that government and commercial surveillance is an issue of increasing importance for libraries and users alike, and librarians need to consider issues of privacy more than ever.
We need to reexamine how we talk about privacy. It’s hard to go a day right now without seeing a major article addressing privacy concerns—be it about personal financial data; the ability to track student progress and report it to parents, teachers, or advisors; new Facebook settings; the stalled USA Freedom Act; and so on. The alarm has been sounded, but the prevailing lack of response is still unnerving.
My last column addressed some of the tensions that underlie the idea of "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" in library leadership, and at the end I promised that my next would deal in a similar way with trying to balance the occasional tension between problems that are truly important and those that are merely "noisy." However, an issue has come up in the meantime that is more timely and urgent, so I'm putting off the "noisy vs. important" column until next time. This month I want to address the issue of patron privacy in the context of the recent revelations about privacy incursions in the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions.
Adobe this week confirmed reports that it has been logging data on the reading activity of people who use the free Adobe Digital Editions service, and that the company has been transmitting those logs to its servers as unencrypted text files, raising privacy and security concerns.
Missouri library patrons can now rest assured that their library records for checkout of digital materials will remain private, thanks to a new state law.
Just because technology allows us to do something, should we? That’s a big question being asked in higher education when it comes to student performance tracking analytics and predictive analytics.
I heard a couple of very interesting presentations this spring given by extremely smart people on ways that libraries can do more with data to improve the user experience, help students succeed, and make a case for the value of libraries. Last week, a group of brave speakers decided to start their slide presentation with a cow and conclude with a grilled steak, asking us to consider whether it was time to finally tackle this library sacred cow: privacy.
I’ve finally dumped Gmail forever. Though the process took quite some time—moving mailing-list subscriptions, changing profiles on websites that knew me by my Gmail address, extracting the messages I needed to keep, and similar chores—the relief of a little more freedom from Google’s privacy-invasive data mining has been well worth the trouble for me. I want as little as possible to do with a company that allegedly thinks trawling and keeping behavior-profile data from college students’ school-mandated, school-purchased email accounts without notice or consent is in some way ethical.
At the next Library Technology Conference in the Twin Cities in March, there won’t be one session on privacy-protecting measures for library computers—there will be two. These aren’t the only sessions of their type I’ve seen advertised lately. I’m delighted to see information professionals stepping up to teach each other how best to protect ourselves and our patrons from unwarranted invasion of privacy by digital means. As it happens, another prime opportunity to register opposition to digital invasion of privacy will arrive on February 11. Several of the best advocacy organizations in the tech industry are joining forces with prominent websites and anyone else going their way for The Day We Fight Back.
A great deal of my professional life is spent trying to make a body of law from the analog age, the 1976 Copyright Act, fit into the digital world. It is a difficult task, but today I want to discuss a different body of law from the same era—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), aka the Buckley amendment—and how it can fit with the new activities we are engaged in in the online age.
Teaching from the real world is pure joy most of the time. Students love it when they see something from class in the pixels of library journals and magazines, the mass media, or the technology press. Most of the time, discussing change while it’s happening is a visceral lesson in professional adaptability and continuous learning. However, I could have done without having to teach technology-related privacy issues to my “Digital Trends, Tools, and Debates” students in the shadow of the NSA’s newly-revealed surveillance practices.
Privacy in our society is being undermined with a daily intensity that may be unmatched in history. The confluence of compromises in our digital lives and the political arena chips away at our sense of what needs to be private and risks codifying a culture in which privacy is not a right but a state hard-won by continual effort or, worse, a state only available to those wealthy enough to protect themselves.
Last weekend I went to Spring Green, Wisconsin for a treat I’d been anticipating most of a year: a double-bill of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at American Players Theatre. I drove home from the theater with lines and themes from the play pulling together disparate threads in my mind, such as opportune moments and their opposites, MIT’s report on its behavior during Aaron Swartz’s prosecution, the Biss bill as the latest twist in the movement toward open access to scholarly literature, and sundry other past and present information-related struggles in academe, and I want to share some of my musings.
Peer to Peer columnist Barbara Fister reflects on the need to reinvigorate instruction in light of how we now collect resources. This essay is part of an exclusive LJ series, Reinventing Libraries, that looks at how the digital shift is impacting libraries’ mission.
University of Washington iSchool’s Joseph Janes calls for libraries to strike a balance between protecting privacy and innovating to add value—with patrons’ permission. This essay is part of an exclusive LJ series, Reinventing Libraries, that looks at how the digital shift is impacting libraries’ mission.
In a series of exclusive essays, thinkers from the library world address how the digital shift is impacting libraries’ mission. Peer to Peer columnist Barbara Fister reflects on the need to reinvigorate instruction in light of how we now collect resources. University of Washington iSchool’s Joseph Janes, in turn, calls for libraries to strike a balance between protecting privacy and innovating to add value—with patrons’ permission.
With the continuing travels of Edward Snowden keeping the National Security Administration's (NSA) surveillance habits in the news, the discussion during Sunday's LITA Top Technology Trends 2013 panel at the American Library Association's Annual Convention turned frequently to the future of privacy, and the role that libraries might play in protecting their patrons.
The American Library Association has launched a new website, ala.org/liberty, in response to the recent revelations about widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). The site offers a toolkit and other resources for libraries to convene forums and moderate community discussions on privacy. Many more resources will be added in the weeks to come, an ALA representative said.
Who owns library and patron user data? Libraries think they do but will that matter in an increasingly competitive landscape where data is very valuable?
I’m a writer, and a geek. So if CourseSmart had wanted to track students’ use of its etextbooks to improve the texts themselves, I could totally sympathize. But it seems to me that CourseSmart wants to use those analytics to fix, not the book, but the reader, and that has the potential to disturb privacy advocates and put students off etextbooks altogether.
CourseSmart, the world’s largest provider of digital course materials, has announced a pilot test of CourseSmart Analytics, a program that will evaluate how students use specific textbooks, measuring page views, total time spent reading, as well as notes and highlights made. In aggregate, the data will allow professors, course designers, and academic administrators to assess the effectiveness of digital titles. Faculty will also have access to the etextbook reading habits of specific students enrolled in their courses.
More than 95 percent of librarians who responded to a recent survey said that “government agencies and businesses shouldn’t share personal information with third parties without authorization and should only be used for a specific purpose,” according to the preliminary findings of a study released by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom
Academic librarians may have thought that Patriot Act-like efforts to monitor the activities of individuals were more the concern of public librarians. A growing security mentality may change life on campus.
