Ask.com and the AskEraser

If anyone else is still knee-deep in the new Privacy Report like I am, then this headline might have caught your eye:

Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy(NYT)

Basically, Ask.com has put a feature on, where you can immediately delete your query. Mostly delete. The article surmises that most Americans don't care about privacy unless/until something happens. Of course, see past libraryland discussions...

Interesting to see if this feature will attract a new set of Ask.com users. What do you think?

Serious game-playing and privacy

A quick shout out to Wandering Eyre for the Chronicle mention on gaming and libraries. Whoo-Hoo!

Speaking of serious game-playing, now that OCLC is seriously researching privacy, it seems like I can't turn around without seeing an article on privacy or hearing a radio report on a new threat. Danny Sullivan was on NPR's Marketplace tonight, talking about our relative lack of privacy in the Web world. (The Privacy International report sparked a lot of the talk, I'm sure. Matt's response.)

And thinking about privacy in the Web world leads me to thinking about privacy in libraries. One of the tenets we've been talking about with the advocacy research we're doing, is how U.S. libraries are seen (at least in some consumers' eyes) as a democratic institution, a part of the fabric of life as ingrained as voting and representative government. (Motherhood and apple pie? Death and taxes?) I started to wonder about how private our political lives are--and/or how much they should be. Certainly my vote is private (at least until I slap on a candidate sticker) and perhaps my IRS return is semi-private. What else is? What is not? Why and why not? And how did library records get mixed up in the middle of it?

These are questions that I have no idea if they'll be addressed in the privacy report or not. But I can tell you that once your consciousness is raised about it, privacy concerns are everywhere. My shredder is busy.

OCLC Symposium in Washington, DC

As we have done for many years, OCLC will be hosting a Symposium at ALA Annual in DC. It will be June 22, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, at the Grand Hyatt Washington, Independence Ballroom A and registration is here. The topic of this one is related to our forthcoming report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in the Age of the Networked Community.

Title: Is the Library Open?

Hear from three experts on the issues of information privacy law, copyright, digital communication, intellectual property and patron privacy rights in relation to library policies.

The speakers are:
· Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and professor of privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center. "EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. EPIC publishes an award-winning e-mail and online newsletter on civil liberties in the information age – the EPIC Alert."

· Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian, media scholar and an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University. He blogs at Sivacracy.net. A journalist before he became a professor, he has written several books (including The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System) as well as for many periodicals. And he's been on The Daily Show, but you can't see that clip on YouTube anymore because of the Viacom copyright claim.

· Mary Minow, a library law consultant with LibraryLaw.com, coauthor of The Library’s Legal Answer Book and a public librarian for 10 years. She is the coauthor with Tomas Lipinski of The Library's Legal Answer Book (ALA Editions: 2003). She blogs at LibraryLaw.Blog and says this about herself, "I studied library law, that is the combined study of First Amendment, Copyright, Local Government Law, Disability Law, Negotiations etc. Now what I care about is sharing the most practical parts of the law that I learned, the good, the bad and the ugly, with my former colleagues, the librarians of the world."