Information Ethics Roundtable 2012
When: Friday, April 27, 8:30AM to 5PM, and Saturday, April 28, 9AM-12:30PM
Where: Hunter College
8th floor, Hunter West, SW corner of Lexington and 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
Admission is free.
This year’s topic: Privacy and the Challenge of Technology
We live in an information society. Information and information technology are increasingly essential to our social, economic, and political interactions. Given this, serious reflection on information ethics is imperative. Information ethics studies the value questions that arise from the creation, control, and access to information. The Information Ethics Roundtable is a yearly conference that brings together information scientists, librarians, philosophers, and social scientists to discuss ethical issues such as intellectual property, intellectual freedom, and censorship. The focus of this year’s roundtable is privacy and technology. In one sense technology has been a boon for privacy. For instance, ATMs and online banking mean that we seldom have to present ourselves to a teller. Online shopping offers similar benefits. However, technology can also pose a serious threat to privacy, since so much of what we now do leaves an enduring digital record. This new information can be recombined to create detailed profiles that couldn’t have emerged in pre-digital days. Moreover, we often have no idea what happens to this information after it has been created.
Questions that the Roundtable will be addressing include:
- Is privacy valuable?
- To what extent does privacy benefit from technology?
- To what extent is privacy threatened by technology?
- When is the sharing of others’ personal information appropriate or inappropriate?
- What role should privacy play in increasingly digitized academic and public libraries?
- To what extent is privacy law keeping up with changes in technology?
- Does privacy have a future?
Keynote Speaker:
Helen Nissenbaum (Media, Culture, and Communication & Computer Science, NYU), author of Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy,and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford Law, 2010)
Invited speaker:
James Stacey Taylor (Philosophy, Religion, and Classical Studies, College of New Jersey), author of Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are a Moral Imperative (Ashgate, 2005).
Report on the 2012 Roundtable from Beth Evans, Brooklyn College Library
2012 Roundtable Sponsors:
* Hunter College Library
* Hunter College Office of the Provost
* Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY)
* Office of Library Services, The City University of New York
Previous Roundtables:
- 2011: Information Rights as Human Rights
- 2010: Consumer Health Information
- 2009: Misinformation and Disinformation
- 2008: Information Ethics and its Applications
- 2007: Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Property
- 2006: Secrecy
- 2005: Intellectual Property
- 2004: Privacy
- 2003
Future Roundtables:
2013
Location: University of Washington, Seattle
Program chair: Adam Moore, I School and Philosophy Department
Topic: To be announced
2014
Location: University of Alberta, Edmondton
Program chair: Toni Samek, School of Library and Information Studies
Topic: To be announced
2015
Location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Program chair: Alan Rubel, School of Library and Information Studies
Topic: To be announced
2016
Location: Washington and Lee University, Lexington Virginia
Program chair: James Mahon, Philosophy Department
Topic: To be announced
Program Chair:
Tony Doyle, Hunter College Library
Program Committee:
Don Fallis, School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona
Kay Mathiesen, School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona
Adam Moore, I School and Philosophy, University of Washington
Toni Samek, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta
Catherine Womack, Philosophy, Bridgewater State University
Please address all questions to Tony Doyle, tdoyle@hunter.cuny.edu.
IER 2012 