Digital Curation and Privacy

Last week in class, we talked about the difference between a digital library and a digital curation project. While the difference between the two hasn't been entirely fleshed out, the essential divide seems to be that digital libraries have a specific and narrow focus in terms of the scope of their curation whereas digital curation projects (e.g., Google Books) are more broadly focused and their curation efforts are less constrained. While there are certainly many positive aspects to a broadly focused curation project, the unwieldy nature of such projects can give rise to a number of issues, one of which is privacy.

In his talk at the Web Wise Conference in 2002, Clifford Lynch delineates some of the positive and negative aspects of digital curation projects. While his talk predates the implementation of most of the major projects which are currently ongoing, Lynch presciently predicts that books will begin to "talk to each other," meaning that books (or artifacts in general) in a digital collection will create linkages between each other effectively making relevant information more accessible. Lynch predicts (presciently again) that the downside to all of this sharing is that there will come a time when books do more than talk to each other, they will also talk with "external programs and organizations and people." Lynch states that this will create a situation that is "potentially annoying and invasive and raises some privacy issues."

This morning, I noticed that the most e-mailed article on the website of the New York Times was the article "Facebook Exodus." The author cites a number of reasons why people seem to be leaving Facebook, but the most widespread reason seems to be Facebook's lack of attention to the privacy of its users1 personal information. "It's not 'your' Facebook profile. It is Facebook's profile about you," one former user declares. Another laments that the site seemed to be "crawling with mercenaries trying to sell books and movies."

While not a digital repository in the traditional sense, I think that it would be fair to characterize Facebook as a digital curation project. Like Twitter, it curates information about its users and creates linkages between the various bits of information. As digital curation projects, Facebook and Twitter raise some interesting and difficult issues regarding the ownership of the information contained in their sites because unlike a digitial library where there is a clear distinction between the 'object of study' and the 'user,' users of Facebook and Twitter effectively function as both 'user' and 'object.' In this instance, privacy becomes a tricky subject and it's a subject that has received, in my opinion, far too little consideration especially because both Facebook and Twitter are being used by millions of people most of whom must have no idea what is being done with their personal information and whether they have any rights to protect that information.

In October 2007, at the OECD Participative Web Forum, Richard Ackerman of the blog Science Library Pad asked a panel the following question regarding Facebook Applications: "How do we deal with privacy when we expect that sites will want to interlink like this, that people will want to connect their information..." The response Mr. Ackerman received from Mozelle Thompson of Facebook boiled down to "...if you don't want to share your information with that application, you should not download that application." Surely, there must be a better way to restrict access to personal information.

In his blog post, Ackerman points to a press release from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada dated August 27, 2009. First of all - Canada has a "Privacy Commissioner?" Wow. The Canadians seem to be at the forefront of reigning in social networking sites so their users have more power to restrict third-party access to their personal information. Up to this point, application developers have had "virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information." However now, Facebook has agreed to "retrofit its application platform in a way that will prevent any application from accessing information until it obtains express consent for each category of personal information it wishes to access." Check out the press release for a full listing of the privacy restrictions that Facebook has agreed to.

One of the themes I think would be interesting to discuss over the semester is - what happens to privacy considerations when the distinction between 'user' and 'object' becomes blurred? Do the benefits of creating linkages between information trump the user's desire for privacy? Is there a happy medium, and could that medium be provided through government regulation? Or is the best option for an individual concerned about privacy to simply opt-out? Incidentally, this is the option that I have decided to take. I am, admittedly, one of the few non-Facebook holdouts, but it seems like there will be more people joining my ranks in the near future.