June through November 2019, Web Services and Multimedia Librarian Prof. Junior Tidal and former adjunct librarian Michelle Nitto participated in the Library Freedom Institute (LFI). LFI is a grant funded educational project that trains librarians to be better privacy advocates. Alison Macrina heads the project.
Over a period of 6 months, participants learned about a wide-range of topics from the data and metadata passively collected from social media and search engines, to artificial intelligence(AI), facial recognition, digital redlining, and much more.
Guest lecturers at LFI included other librarians, lawyers, privacy experts and activists, journalists, artists, and authors. It was a well-rounded selection of guest speakers that examined the larger implications of losing our privacy and the importance of teaching patrons on how to better safeguard themselves from unwanted surveillance and data collection.
For example, it is well known that search engine algorithms can reinforce racial stereotypes, however, it may not be that well known that facial recognition technology uses open datasets to “learn” about users. This learning can be used for such purposes of identifying one’s race, age, gender, and other attributes. These datasets are culled from publicly available images to open YouTube clips. This technology is far from perfect as there are instances of misidentifying users due to their darker skin or having a limited dataset that lacks the diversity of the real-world.
Technology platforms build in bias that also has implications for research. One instance may include a college that uses web filtering software. This software may block legitimate research conducted by students and faculty. If this information is filtered, the student may, at best, think that it is not available through their college network, or at worst think that it does not exist at all. Chris Gilliard, a guest lecturer and Professor of English at Macomb Community College, notes that this “digitally redlines” community college students in comparison to R1 institutions.
Over the last few years, the City Tech Library has offered privacy workshops, open to both students and faculty. After participating in LFI, Prof. Junior Tidal led a redesign of the workshops, which he co-teaches with Profs. Nora Almeida, Monica Berger to be interactive more interactive. Participants are invited to consider what kind of information about them is being collected in different contexts, who is collecting it (and why, and how it is used. The workshop culminates by introducing attendees to practical privacy tools that can use. Want to learn more? Check out our online privacy research guide!
The City Tech Library and Librarians across CUNY are also discussing ways that they can build patron privacy protections into the technology and digital tools that we provide to our patrons. We’ve set all library computers to clear caches and wipe search histories automatically, are exploring installing alternative browsers like TOR on our public workstations, and have set the duck-duck-go search engine–which doesn’t use ad tracking–as the default on public service station browsers. The newly revived Library Association CUNY Privacy Roundtable has been working on building privacy protections for patrons into our contracts with vendors so that research database vendors, don’t collect patron data to sell to third-parties or share with law enforcement agencies. The Privacy Roundtable is hosting an upcoming workshop focused on strategies CUNY Librarians can adopt in order to address privacy issues with administrators, faculty, and staff at their campuses. The workshop will be lead by Bonnie Tijerina from the Data Privacy Project.
If faculty are interested in scheduling a custom data privacy workshop for their class, they can contact Profs. Junior Tidal, Nora Almeida, or Monica Berger.
