Privacy literacy reboot

Privacy is a core value of librarianship. Since the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the rise of social media and smartphones in the 2000s, and the release of NSA documents by Snowden in 2013, librarians have espoused renewed commitments to protecting patron privacy. While protecting patron privacy is an essential first step to living up to our professional commitments, it is also critical that we educate students and colleagues on issues relating to privacy. The Library Bill of Rights was recently amended with the addition of Article VII, which clearly articulates librarians’ role in privacy education and advocacy. With growing social justice issues related to algorithmic bias and the disparate impact of surveillance, it is more important than ever for librarians to assume leadership in advocating for and educating about privacy. This discussion aims to encourage participants to contemplate how to answer ALA’s call and equip librarians to lead privacy literacy efforts on campus.  

Privacy literacy (PL) is a developing area of library instruction and scholarship. Prior work has proposed PL frameworks and posited various harm reduction / critical thinking methodologies, as well as, critiqued PL approaches that overpromise user control in the face of information asymmetries and the control paradox (Brandimarte, Acquisti, & Loewenstein 2012; Hagendorff, 2018).  

Moderators’ emerging scholarship advances PL practice in these contexts by applying PL theory and the ACRL Framework to inform, and assess, PL instruction practices (Hartman-Caverly & Chisholm, 2020). They will share instructional materials that deliver PL using best practices in inclusive pedagogy, universal design for learning, and active learning. This work is shaped by an underlying philosophy of privacy as a sociocultural construct protecting concentric zones of informational agency that comprise identity, intellectual activity, bodily integrity, contextual integrity, intimate relationships, free association, and voluntary withdrawal into solitude.   

The discussion will open with an overview of moderators’ ongoing scholarship on PL, showcase activities from their Privacy Workshop Series, explore the importance of privacy as a value system, and engage participants in discussions about PL approaches in their local campus contexts and within the profession.  The facilitated discussion among panelists will focus on PL practices, philosophies, and future directions.    

Participants will gain working knowledge of contemporary privacy challenges and solutions to build professional self-efficacy, access the moderators’ PL toolkit featuring resources to develop future PL programming, and leave inspired to lead PL education and advocacy initiatives.