Michael Zimmer (academic)

Last updated
Michael Zimmer
Alma mater University of Notre Dame (B.B.A. Marketing, 1994)
New York University (M.A. Media Ecology, 2002)
New York University (Ph.D. Media, Culture and Communication, 2007)
Scientific career
Fields privacy, internet ethics, data ethics, internet research ethics, social computing
Institutions University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2008-2019)
Marquette University (2019-present)
Website michaelzimmer.org

Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar. He currently is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and Director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. Previously, he was on the faculty at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and director of the Center for Information Policy Research. [1] Zimmer is on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, [2] and was on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2009-2016. [3] He was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School from 2007-2008. [4]

Contents

Zimmer has criticized the research ethics of a Harvard-sponsored research project that harvested the Facebook profiles of an entire cohort of undergraduate students. [5] He has appeared on the National Public Radio shows Science Friday [6] and Morning Edition. [7] [8] Zimmer appeared in the "Is My Cellphone Spying On Me?" commentary accompanying the DVD release of Eagle Eye [9]

On October 25, 2013, Zimmer announced "The Zuckerberg Files", a digital archive of all the public utterances of Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. [10] [11] Zimmer published a critique of Zuckerberg in The Washington Post to commemorate Facebook's 10th anniversary. [12] In 2021, Zimmer was named among experts advising Gizmodo regarding the release of The Facebook Papers [13]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Schneier</span> American computer scientist

Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and The Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and is a squid enthusiast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wirehog</span>

Wirehog was a friend-to-friend file sharing program that was linked to Facebook and allowed people to transfer files directly between computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Zuckerberg</span> American billionaire internet entrepreneur (born 1984)

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American business magnate, computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He co-founded the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is executive chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.

Gregory Stock is an American biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.

Internet research ethics involves the research ethics of social science, humanities, and scientific research carried out via the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook</span> Social networking service owned by Meta Platforms

Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American technology giant Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 3 billion monthly active users, and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Rotenberg</span>

Marc Rotenberg is president and founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, an independent non-profit organization, incorporated in Washington, D.C. Rotenberg is the editor of The AI Policy Sourcebook, a member of the OECD Expert Group on AI, and helped draft the Universal Guidelines for AI. He teaches the GDPR and privacy law at Georgetown Law and is coauthor of Privacy Law and Society and The Privacy Law Sourcebook (2020). Rotenberg is a founding board member and former chair of the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain.

Facebook has been the subject of criticism and legal action. Criticisms include the outsize influence Facebook has on the lives and health of its users and employees, as well as Facebook's influence on the way media, specifically news, is reported and distributed. Notable issues include Internet privacy, such as use of a widespread "like" button on third-party websites tracking users, possible indefinite records of user information, automatic facial recognition software, and its role in the workplace, including employer-employee account disclosure. The use of Facebook can have negative psychological and physiological effects that include feelings of sexual jealousy, stress, lack of attention, and social media addiction that in some cases is comparable to drug addiction.

Beacon formed part of Facebook's advertisement system that sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Beacon reported to Facebook on Facebook's members' activities on third-party sites that also participated with Beacon. These activities were published in users' News Feed. This occurred even when users were not connected to Facebook, and happened without the knowledge of the Facebook user. The service was controversial and became the target of a class-action lawsuit, resulting in it shutting down in September 2009. One of the main concerns was that Beacon did not give the user the option to block the information from being sent to Facebook. Beacon was launched on November 6, 2007, with 44 partner websites. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, characterized Beacon on the Facebook Blog in November 2011 as a "mistake." Although Beacon was unsuccessful, it did pave the way for Facebook Connect, which has become widely popular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Breyer</span> American venture capitalist (born 1961)

James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. Breyer has invested in over 40 companies that have gone public or completed a merger, with some of these investments, including Facebook, earning over 100 times cost and many others over 25 times cost. On the Forbes 2021 list of the 400 richest Americans, he was ranked #389, with a net worth of US$2.9 billion.

<i>The Accidental Billionaires</i> Ben Mezrich book about the early years of Facebook

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal is a 2009 book by Ben Mezrich about the founding of Facebook, adapted by Aaron Sorkin for the 2010 film The Social Network. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin served as Mezrich's main consultant, although he declined to speak with him while the book was being researched. After Zuckerberg and Saverin settled their lawsuit, Saverin broke off contact with the author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Facebook</span>

Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, in particular Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook like button</span> Feature of the social networking website Facebook

The like button on the social networking website Facebook was first enabled on February 9, 2009. The like button enables users to easily interact with status updates, comments, photos and videos, links shared by friends, and advertisements. Once clicked by a user, the designated content appears in the News Feeds of that user's friends, and the button also displays the number of other users who have liked the content, including a full or partial list of those users. The like button was extended to comments in June 2010. After extensive testing and years of questions from the public about whether it had an intention to incorporate a "Dislike" button, Facebook officially rolled out "Reactions" to users worldwide on February 24, 2016, letting users long-press on the like button for an option to use one of five pre-defined emotions, including "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad", or "Angry". Reactions were also extended to comments in May 2017, and had a major graphical overhaul in April 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Censorship by Facebook</span>

Facebook has been involved in multiple controversies involving censorship of content, removing or omitting information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.

In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ifeoma Ajunwa</span> Nigerian writer and law professor

Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa is a Nigerian-American writer, AI Ethics legal scholar, sociologist, and tenured professor of law at the University of North Carolina School Of Law in the United States. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project (ISP) and she has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. From 2021–2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria where she studied the role of law for tech start-ups. At UNC Law, she is the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law where she designed and created the first ever clearinghouse for scholarship and research on AI and the Law. She was previously an assistant professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University from 2017–2020, earning tenure there in 2020.

<i>The Great Hack</i> 2019 documentary film

The Great Hack is a 2019 documentary film about the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, both previous documentary Academy Award nominees. The film's music was composed by Emmy-nominated film composer Gil Talmi. The Great Hack premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in the Documentary Premieres section and was released by Netflix on July 24, 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meta Platforms</span> American multinational technology corporation

Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta is one of the world's most valuable companies and among the ten largest publicly traded corporations in the United States. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

www

References

  1. "About the Director", Center for Information Policy Research Archived 2011-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
  2. FPF Advisory Board Archived 2011-10-05 at the Wayback Machine
  3. New Executive Committee
  4. "ISP Alumni". Archived from the original on 2012-01-29. Retrieved 2011-12-28.
  5. "Harvard Researchers Accused of Breaching Students' Privacy". Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2011.
  6. Online Privacy Archived 2011-10-25 at the Wayback Machine , May 21st, 2010
  7. Groups Complain To FTC About Facebook Changes, January 4, 2010
  8. Biography
  9. "Eagle Eye: Special Edition (2008)".
  10. "‘The Zuckerberg Files’: New Scholarly Archive Scrutinizes Facebook CEO". Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2013.
  11. "Privacy Advocate Creates “Zuckerberg Files” Archive". The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2013.
  12. "Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of privacy". The Washington Post, February 4, 2014.
  13. Cameron, Dell; Couts, Andrew; Wodinsky, Shoshana (2021-11-22). "We're Making the Facebook Papers Public. Here's Why and How". Gizmodo. Retrieved 20 December 2021.