The survey focused entirely on sources of information that can be optimized for advertising dollars – and how to drive the public toward news media for purchasing decisions – so they may have just decided libraries don’t belong on the list. But when they ask about “where you go for information” and libraries aren’t there, it suggests value is only attached to information sources that exist to generate advertising dollars and stock dividends.

The study reports that people are increasingly skeptical about mass media and that “word of mouth” is more important than being told what to read through PR and marketing. In other words, you PR flaks have shot yourselves in the foot and are now trying to learn how to talk like a human.

Maybe our users need to get a little more outspoken. Libraries have net assets worth billions! You can claim your dividend every time you use them! You can use them online with no pay wall! And no harvesting of personal information or annoying banner ads!

I think we have an edge, here, if only we were able to get the word out.

The majority of Internet users responding to the survey say they don’t worry about it. Most would like to control their digital image – but don’t take steps to do it. (Interestingly teens are more likely to limit access to their profiles. Many adults feel an unlimited online presence is necessary for their careers – and teens may feel limiting their profile is an equally smart move for their future careers.) Technology has changed our expectations: the interactivity of Web 2.0 and the addition of new data formats and geotagging will only increase the fine grain of our digital footprint. But so have external events. The public grew far more tolerant of having their privacy invaded after 9/11, according to several studies in a fascinating section of the report.

My guess is that we’ve been equally desensitized by advertising that is driven by harvesting and analyzing our searches, and by banks and other corporation routinely mining our lives for personal information. (Fortunately Senator Dodd thinks there should be some limits to corporate spying, at least when it contributes to a violation of the constitution.)

The recent OCLC report on Sharing, Privacy, and Trust in our Networked World found that only about half of respondents want libraries to keep their activities private, in contrast to librarians, who are more likely to find privacy important. In general, this report jibes with Pew’s in that people want to control what they share. They just aren’t very aware of what they’re sharing when they’re not in control. The degree of trust in information services that store their searches and use that information commercially either means there’s a disconnect between wanting to control what they share and letting corporations harvest information from their searches – or they simply don’t recognize the extent to which it’s happening.

The OCLC report urges libraries to do more social networking to develop trust.

We know that privacy is important to users, and to librarians, but we also know that sharing and open access matter. Privacy matters, but sharing matters more. If the axiom “convenience trumps quality” was the trade-off that gave rise to the search portals as providers of “good enough” information, it might be said of the social Web that “sharing trumps privacy.”

Unfortunately the example they use as a success in this area is the banking industry (huh?), not sites that seem to take both readers and privacy more seriously, like LibraryThing (which is not mentioned in the OCLC report, though it’s doing largely what the report recommends libraries do). And it seems to contradict the report’s belief that people are desperate to share that there are only seven comments at the site OCLC created to discuss the report.

The blogger Rudibrarian has a brilliant post on this issue.

Something I think about whenever I see a list of Cool 2.0 Free Tools You Can Implement At Your Library is privacy (or more accurately, confidentiality). Why are they free? Who’s getting what? Does the user retain ownership of their information? Is the library facilitating the sale or use of users’ information when offering this tool?

I *only* think about this when I see others’ implementations or lists of tools. I almost never think about it when I myself am doing something where I ought to think about it. Like, perhaps, when adding applications to my facebook….

…Users ought to worry about this stuff but the information world has gone completely mad and out of control and is being monetized and ramified in all sorts of ways they can’t even begin to understand when they take their first gateway drug (which might be a DisneyPhone designed to allow their parents to track their every movement and thus desensitize them further!)

So, librarians used to have this bill of rights to guide library services which states

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

Which I read to mean that libraries and librarians work to support the statement that all individuals are free to read whatever they choose and that such reading is nobody’s business but their own. Essentially, that libraries and librarians are (or should be) committed to protecting patron privacy and confidentiality (two similar but not identical goals).

So, questions to ponder for later parsing:

1. Are libraries still committed to this?
2. Should we care that our patrons (especially academic library patrons, since that’s my ball of string) don’t care about their own privacy or confidentiality? Should their naiveté trump our responsibilities?
3. Does our desire to do more for our patrons hold hands with their naiveté to further sexy goals, or is it OK to not let them know what we’re doing (or that we don’t know!)?
4. Does anyone know how much info we’re giving away though Facebook? or other username/password identity sites?
5. Is it still within our power to prevent Minority Report from becoming reality?

To which I’d add: Aren’t these all questions we should be asking ourselves, right now, urgently?

There are two must-read discussions over at if:book on the NEA’s latest threnody for reading. The first looks at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s interesting take, previously published in the Chronicle. The NEA report assumes one sort of reading – solitary, linear, purposeless, and sustained. Yet there is a certain kind of reading that is lateral (and very common in academic libraries) – comparing texts, following footnotes, pursuing leads from one line of thought to another, books spread out for easier access – that has been around long before the digital era. (And, of course, now we even have a primer on how to talk about books we haven’t read.) The NEA assumes there is only one sort of reading that has value. I like a long, sustained read as much as anyone (I was a Russian Lit major, fer cripe’s sake!) but I do plenty of the other, and it’s valuable, too.

The other if:book instant classic is Nancy Kaplan looking at the NCES data that the NEA uses to link declines in “reading” (narrowly defined) and reading test scores. The NEA report skews it – and they’ve been outed. This is an important critique, and a fascinating example that demonstrates critical information literacy. This would actually make for a good classroom exercise – look at press coverage, go to the NEA source, then look at the underlying data. It’s a corker!

Finally – Facebook faced up to the storm of criticism that met their plan to broadcast to members’ friends what members are buying at other sites. (A few Christmas present surprises were spoiled in the process.) They’ve decided to make it opt-in, not opt-out. Let’s hope they learned something in the process.

The bad news is that Facebook’s new advertising policies are alarming. They hope to recruit members as a sales force for participating products – they call it social advertising. Not only will ads be tailored to what I’m doing online (yes, we’r getting sadly used to that), they will be sent to others with my face on them. Well, maybe not MY face, surely Facebook has better sense than that. But the idea that my “friendships” would be used for spamming acquaintances in my name is disturbing. It may also be illegal. Facebook isn’t too worried, though. We can opt out if we so choose. If we don’t, though, we’ll be recommending products to friends. The New York Times examined this in its advertising industry coverage.

“Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Facebook users will not be able to avoid these personally recommended ads if they are friends with participating people. Participation can involve joining a fan club for a brand, recommending a product or sharing information about their purchases from external Web sites.

Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought this system would make the site feel “less commercial,” because the marketing messages will be accompanied by comments from friends. When asked about people who might not like ads, Mr. Zuckerberg shrugged and said, “I mean, it’s an ad-supported business.”

Librarians have a healthy concern for reader privacy. Our assumptions have been challenged lately by Web 2.0 affordances like book recommendation engines and social networking around what we read. (Sometimes the response to privacy concerns is “just get over it!”) We want to enable the kinds of social networking that people want, without storing permanent records of every book they choose to explore. Our main concern has been Big Brother. Now it’s clear we have to watch out for Big Business. (Well, we knew that . . . but this is a new and insidious move.)

We don’t always do a good job of explaining our values to non-librarians. We explain them when asked, and when we’re really cornered, as with the PATRIOT Act, we might go so far as to put up a sign. But privacy – the use of information about me – is something that is increasingly “opt out” only and the violation of that privacy is becoming the engine of commerce. Our discussion of the ethical use of information (per the information literacy standards) tends to begin and end with plagiarism. Shouldn’t we also be talking about the ethics of information more broadly?

Carlson thinks back to Vannevar Bush’s famous Memex, a method of indexing information by trails of personal associations. He mulls over the implications for learning and memory. Could recording your life make it easier to index it? find memories? recall material from a course you’re taking? Would you be inundated with cease-and-desist letters because your life record happens includes music you overheard, television you watched, something you read? Would you act differently if you knew a record was being made? How would those around you feel if you you captured their lives, too? And wouldn’t it make writing a subpoena a breeze? (Where were you on the night of February 5th? Don’t answer that, just hand it over. All of it. Make sure it includes your GPS coordinates.)

Mark T. Bolas, who teaches film at UCLA believes we’ll all be doing this soon, and it will be a good thing because “nobody could ever lie again.” Maybe I’m just cranky because I live in a part of the country where it hasn’t been above zero for days, but someone who lives in LA and studies film for a living doesn’t seem to me to be the most reliable authority on how to tell the truth.

I’m more taken with the SF dystopian versions Carlson refers to, and with the ideas Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University law professor and privacy expert, raises.

Jewish law says that the mere possibility of unwanted observation, even if no one is really watching, injures a person’s sense of privacy . . . Anyone who has ever thought seriously about privacy would shudder at the thought of a lifelogged world, Mr. Rosen says. “The standard techno-positivist enthusiasm — that this is inevitable and that we should get used to it — is wrong and dramatically understates the social cost of this sort of technology,” he says.

We’ve become altogether too used to trading technological advances for the benefits of personal privacy, whether for exhibitionism, convenience, or national security. Even if lifelogging isn’t tempting, this essay about it brings many of those issues into clearer focus.

posted by Barbara Fister

There’s much to be confused about here. Supposedly the government is not asking for information on individual users, just what searches have been done in any given week (and hey, who doesn’t trust the government when it comes to spying?). Why is Google so reluctant to give this out that they’ll defy a subpoena? I’d say it must be more for business reasons than concerns about user privacy. (Maybe they’re concerned about what will happen if advertisers find out what a huge percentage of Google searches are actually for porn.) And, come to think about it, what’s this about defying a subpoena? How do you do that exactly? I don’t think libraries are ever advised to go that far to protect user privacy.

The best reporting I’ve read on this so far is the San Jose Mercury News. The Wall Street Journal coverage does note that libraries make more of an effort to protect user privacy than most companies.

A 2005 study by Steven Johns and Karen Lawson provides some hard numbers to gauge student attitudes about privacy and the library. In the debate between personalization and privacy only 23% of students at Iowa State University felt that “developing student profiles for the purpose of enhancing the Library’s collection and services constituted justifiable use.” So before you go bibliomining your circ database or developing a user community around archived email reference questions, you may want to check out “University undergraduate students and library-related privacy issues” in Library & Information Science Research, 27 (Sept 2005) 485-495.