Library 2.016: Privacy in the Digital Age

Recently I registered for the online conference Library 2.016: Privacy in the Digital Age, the first of three scheduled this year run by Library 2.0. Recordings from the conference are viewable online.

The conference looked at issues surrounding privacy and security online. It had a US focus but there was plenty that was relevant to the UK. For me, the most interesting presentations were, firstly, Jessamyn West's The Digital Divide and Privacy Concerns, which discussed the privacy needs and wants of "ordinary" people. She pointed out that while having lots of passwords to protect your online privacy is the ideal, in practice it's unlikely that people will be willing to do this and it's important to balance privacy with realism. I also found M. Ryan Hess's Make Your Library a Privacy and Security Resource interesting, with discussions of various privacy and security tools including Firefox, Ghostery, Disconnect and DuckDuckGo. On a more theoretical level, Martyn Wade's presentation on The 'Right to be Forgotten' and Its Impact on Libraries and Librarians was also interesting.