Category: Surveillance
Prioritizing Intellectual Freedom & Privacy: Your Itinerary for ALA Annual 2023
Whether you’re a seasoned advocate or new to ALA Annual, we encourage you to prioritize the many events focusing on intellectual freedom and library privacy. In an era marked by rising censorship and attempts to limit intellectual freedom, it’s more crucial than ever for library workers to champion these fundamental principles of a healthy democracy.
Protecting health privacy in the age of digital surveillance
With the Supreme Court apparently set to overturn Roe v. Wade, patrons may turn to libraries for help seeking information about reproductive health options in private. The ethics of our profession mandate that we do so. We can help patrons by teaching them how to protect their digital privacy on their own devices and ensuring our public computers employ the strongest, most up-to-date protections.
IFC Forms Working Group to Respond to Facial Recognition Technology
By: IFC Chair Julia Warga. The ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee formed the Facial Recognition Working Group in order to better understand the issues relating to this evolving technology and how it would impact the privacy of library users. We believe the work is urgent given that there are libraries and educational institutions who are beginning to adopt facial recognition software as a means of identifying authorized users and students.
Privacy Matters: A Critique of Open Libraries
The advent of self-service libraries is a radical approach to serving patrons with varying schedules, but negative consequences lurk behind expanded access. These unstaffed spaces rely on surveillance technology in order to keep the peace and protect their inventory.
Ethics of Analysis: Learning Analytics and Academic Libraries
Many academic institutions–and their libraries–are using learning analytics to improve their services and reach out to students who need help, but when does data collection cross the line and become surveillance?
An Interview With Snowden Becker. “Keeping the Pieces:” Police Work and Documentation
Bodycams, First Amendment, Live PD, law and order: police work has been in the news a lot lately, and I have been thinking about how the police order, organize, and control all of that information when literal life and freedom are on the line. I sat down with Snowden Becker, formerly of UCLA, and a researcher into police archives and work to talk about these topics and intellectual freedom.
Actions Shutting Down Information and Freedom – Interior’s Attack on FOIA
The Freedom of Information Act, an invaluable tool for democracy, is under attack. New Interior Department regulations are targeting those who use it the most–journalists, academics, researchers and more. Furthermore, the shutdown is compounding the issue and allowing the possibly-illegal and definitely-unethical change to happen unnoticed.
A Review of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” cont…
By: Allyson Mower I reviewed Part I of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power in a previous […]
A Review of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
We live in an age of information and that world is made up of both information rights and information capitalism. The book aims to define this new market of surveillance capitalism, how it originated, and what this type of capitalism means for the information rights of individuals in the digital age.
DNA Kits: What Does Your Cousin’s DNA Reveal About You?
Many of us have probably seen news articles raising privacy concerns regarding home DNA test kits, but now evidence indicates that choosing to take one of these at-home DNA tests may have privacy implications for not only you, but also your family members.