ALA OIF
Deborah Caldwell-Stone | April 16, 2013

In an era of “Big Data,” someone is tracking your every move. Whether it’s your location, your phone calls, your Facebook posts, your purchases or the websites you visit, your daily activities are monitored, recorded, collected and stored. But all too often, you can’t tell by whom.

Information should go both ways or not at all. Everyone should have the right to know who’s collecting their information and choose how their private data is used.

During Choose Privacy Week, May 1 – 7, 2013, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) invites everyone to visit their local library to find out about the importance of individual privacy rights and understand how to protect those rights when businesses and the government alike are collecting and using their personal data.

“People who understand how personal data is generated, collected, stored and used are better equipped to take control of their personal data and demand accountability from the agencies and corporations that store and use their information,” said Barbara Jones, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom. “As institutions that traditionally defend and protect individual privacy, libraries are uniquely equipped to help individuals understand precisely what personal data is being collected about them and how businesses, institutions and government agencies use that data to monitor and shape their daily activities.”

This year’s Choose Privacy Week observance will feature a week-long online forum that will include an introduction from Barbara Jones and guest commentaries by academics, librarians and civil liberties experts that discuss current threats to personal privacy and how each threat impacts personal freedoms and civil liberties. The commentaries will be featured on the newly redesigned website at www.chooseprivacyweek.org, the online hub for Choose Privacy Week activities.

The social media hashtag for Choose Privacy Week is #chooseprivacy.

Scheduled guest commentators include Khaliah Barnes of the Electronic Privacy Information Center; Shaun Dakin, Privacy Camp; Mitra Ebadolahi, the ACLU National Security Project; Rachel Levinson-Waldman, NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice; Deborah Peel, MD, Patient Privacy Rights; Chip Pitts, Stanford Law School; Lew Maltby, Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations; and J. Douglas Archer, librarian at the University of Notre Dame and chair of the ALA-IFC Privacy Subcommittee.

Now in its fourth year, Choose Privacy Week is a national public awareness campaign that seeks to deepen public awareness about personal privacy rights and the need to insure those rights in an era of pervasive surveillance. Through programming, online education and special events, libraries will offer individuals opportunities to learn, think critically and make more informed choices about their privacy. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom established Choose Privacy Week to help libraries work with their communities in navigating these complicated but vital issues. Privacy has long been a cornerstone of library services in America and a right that librarians defend every day.

For more information on Choose Privacy Week, visit www.chooseprivacyweek.org or contact Deborah Caldwell-Stone in the Office for Intellectual Freedom at 312-280-4224 or dstone@ala.org.

THE ATLANTIC
Jathan Sadowski | February 26, 2013

Our privacy is now at risk in unprecedented ways, but, sadly, the legal system is lagging behind the pace of innovation. Indeed, the last major privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was passed in 1986! While an update to the law — spurred on by the General Petraeus scandal — is in the works, it only aims to add some more protection to electronic communication like emails. This still does not shield our privacy from other, possibly nefarious, ways that our data can be collected and put to use. Some legislators would much rather not have legal restrictions that could, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn stated in an op-ed, “threaten the lifeblood of the Internet: data.” Consider Rep. Blackburn’s remarks during an April 2010 Congressional hearing: “[A]nd what happens when you follow the European privacy model and take information out of the information economy? … Revenues fall, innovation stalls and you lose out to innovators who choose to work elsewhere.”

Even though the practices of many companies such as Facebook are legal, there is something disconcerting about them. Privacy should have a deeper purpose than the one ascribed to it by those who treat it as a currency to be traded for innovation, which in many circumstances seems to actually mean corporate interests. To protect our privacy, we need a better understanding of its purpose and why it is valuable.

Read on…

NEW YORK TIMES
Steven Greenhouse | January 21, 2013

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

But in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal.

Read on…

SLATE
Will Oremus | January 8, 2013

A Texas public school district’s controversial pilot program to keep track of its students on campus with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips has survived a legal challenge in federal court. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia dismissed a request for a preliminary injunction from Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio who refused to wear the school’s ID cards on religious grounds.

Read on…