Nanette Perez of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom sent out a link to this AOL study on web users’ behavior and statements regarding data privacy. The study finds, unsurprisingly, that most web users say they highly value privacy online but routinely give it up in exchange for convenience or small rewards. This study illustrates a … Read more Privacy and markets
ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is engaged in a research project about privacy and libraries. There is a survey to fill out at privacyrevolution.org. I’m not sure where they’re going to go with it, but it’s the OIF and it’s privacy so I support what they’re doing…
On this May Day I want to link you to a book (online) that I’m putting out there as a symbol of Library Juice’s opposition within librarianship and the blogosphere: Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. This book, originally published in 1896, was an important early work in social psychology, … Read more Crowds
Google and Microsoft have both been working on new services to provide access to medical records. Pretty exciting huh? Microsoft’s thing is HealthVault and Google’s is Google Health. I’m sure it’s all very secure and only accessible to Microsoft and Google employees for serious purposes, as governed by those always-changeable privacy policies. What I’m wondering … Read more Get your medical records online, courtesy of Google and Microsoft
Michael Zimmer is the guest editor for the just released special issue of the open access journal First Monday: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0. Here is the table of contents: Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008 Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 edited by Michael Zimmer Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 … Read more First Monday Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you’re using in everyday life could become a tool … Read more Laser printer privacy concern
Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience is an important new book by James B. Rule, who also wrote an influential book on privacy in the 1970s: Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. Just noting it as a book of interest. … Read more Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience
First, Jeffrey Chester’s Google and Data-Seizure, about the significance of Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, the internet marketing and company whose business is based on showing banner ads and tracking users’ web surfing. The article is primarily about privacy and what Google’s continuing acquisition of websites means for it (as the data is conglomerated). Second, Tom … Read more Two articles of interest from The Nation
Is our society gradually forgetting the value of privacy, in libraries and elsewhere? Michael Zimmer, who writes on media ecology, technology, and privacy, gives some attention to online privacy in libraries in a post from yesterday. He links to a blog entry from an anonymous blog called Chronicles of Dissent, comments, and links to some … Read more Some attention to library privacy
Library Juice Concentrate Edited by Rory Litwin Preface by Kathleen de la Peña McCook Price: $25.00 ISBN-10: 0-9778617-3-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-9778617-3-6 6″ by 9″ Published: December 2006 Library Juice Concentrate is a compilation of the best of Library Juice, an e-zine published by Rory Litwin between 1998 and 2005 that dealt with foundational questions of librarianship … Read more New from LJP: Library Juice Concentrate
ALA’s Don Wood has a blog that he uses as a channel for his communications on libraries and intellectual freedom. Today he has a post about the ALA Washington Office and their response to statements by the director of the FBI that they say reveals the Bureau’s continued lack of understanding of libraries and the … Read more Privacy, Libraries, ALA and FBI
Trenchant and insightful article in The Nation by Jeffrey Chester: The Google YouTube Tango. This article focuses on how corporate claims-staking such as Google’s buyout of YouTube and Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Myspace in 2005 are part of the creation of an overall interactive environment whose main function is marketing (advertising and data collection) for … Read more The Nation on the YouTube/Google deal – leading edge of corporate takeover of the web
Really interesting reading about myspace at Valleywag: Myspace: The Business of Spam 2.0 (Exhaustive Edition). This article points out a number of things about myspace that I wish I had known about or noticed much earlier. For example, did you know that Tom Anderson (everybody’s friend Tom) didn’t create Myspace, but was hired for PR … Read more Myspace: the business of Spam 2.0
First Monday’s current issue is about the openness movement, including open access publishing, open source software development, and information projects with distributed authorship. One article is especially interesting: Sandra Braman’s Tactical memory: The politics of openness in the construction of memory, which deals with interesting questions about the possible implications of the openness movement for … Read more The politics of openness
Check out Barbara Fister’s thoughts on Library 2.0 and the culture of reading in her posting on the ACRL blog. She refers and links to a discussion in the mainstream press which I have been neglecting, about how the medium of the web is affecting reading and book culture. This discussion involves Kevin Kelley, Lee … Read more Barbara Fister on Library 2.0 and the culture of reading
Library 2.0 is a powerful idea that finds itself in an awkward predicament. It is an idea that has emerged out of what amounts to a separate discourse within librarianship, that of younger, web-centric librarians who have often have a sense that they are remaking the profession from the ground up for the digital future … Read more The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy
“Two principal computers at the Brecht Forum were removed last night in what appears to be a politically targeted theft. The Brecht Forum is a 30- year old community-based center that offers seminars, lectures and classes in political organizing and progressive analysis to local activists, organizers, students and the public. The computers taken contain the … Read more Political Data-Theft at the Brecht Forum