Intellectual Freedom

Most people believe that the right to privacy is inherently at odds with the right to free speech. Courts all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the problems of media gossip with our commitment to free and open public debate for over a century. The rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, where offensive and hurtful speech about others is rife. How should we think about the problems of privacy and free speech? In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a different solution, one that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies. Because of the importance of free speech to free and open societies, he argues that when privacy and free speech truly conflict, free speech should almost always win. Only when disclosures of truly horrible information are made (such as sex tapes) should privacy be able to trump our commitment to free expression. But in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom, Richards argues that speech and privacy are only rarely in conflict. America's obsession with celebrity culture has blinded us to more important aspects of how privacy and speech fit together. Celebrity gossip might be a price we pay for a free press, but the privacy of ordinary people need not be. True invasions of privacy like peeping toms or electronic surveillance will rarely merit protection as free speech. And critically, Richards shows how most of the law we enact to protect online privacy pose no serious burden to public debate, and how protecting the privacy of our data is not censorship.More fundamentally, Richards shows how privacy and free speech are often essential to each other. He explains the importance of 'intellectual privacy,' protection from surveillance or interference when we are engaged in the processes of generating ideas - thinking, reading, and speaking with confidantes before our ideas are ready for public consumption. In our digital age, in which we increasingly communicate, read, and think with the help of technologies that track us, increased protection for intellectual privacy has become an imperative. What we must do, then, is to worry less about barring tabloid gossip, and worry much more about corporate and government surveillance into the minds, conversations, reading habits, and political beliefs of ordinary people. A timely and provocative book on a subject that affects us all, Intellectual Privacy will radically reshape the debate about privacy and free speech in our digital age.

Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve the privacy practices at your institution, and re-center the individuals behind the data and the ethics behind library work

Examines how communications and writing educators, administrators, technological resource coordinators, and scholars can address the ways surveillance and privacy affect student and faculty composing acts, configure identity formation, and address ways to subvert the surveillance state and offers practical analyses of surveillance and privacy within classrooms and communities

Privacy is a core value of librarianship, yet it often feels like an overwhelming and onerous undertaking. With the creation of ever larger datasets and methods to track users' every movement, library workers need to have a deep understanding of privacy, confidentiality, and security. Written by library privacy experts and based on input and guidance from a wide cross-section of stakeholders, this resource is structured to give library workers the tools needed to create and be advocates for privacy-protecting practices and policies. Complete with an introduction to each topic and several exercises for you to implement privacy changes at your library, with the help of this guide you will learn about creating strong passwords, multifactor authentication, how to avoid malware, and other basic digital security concepts as well as where to go for more help; be able to communicate the importance of privacy and why libraries should care by understanding the people you are trying to reach; navigate areas in your physical library space to help protect users' privacy; see how user data travels through the library and what you can do to protect it; build an audit framework, perform an audit, and tell the audit story; read, understand, and write privacy policies applicable to your library; and gain key strategies to employ while protecting user privacy when engaging vendors.