Today is Data Privacy Day. It is held every year on January 28th.
Data Privacy Day is an effort to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority.(National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013)
After spending the last two weeks thinking about how we participate in social media, Data Privacy Day seemed like a well placed punctuation mark. We read Pearson (2009) and her thoughts about our performance on social networking sites—suspended between the public and the private. We also discussed Albrechtslund (2008) and his ideas about online social networking and participatory surveillance practices—where surveillance can be mutual, empowering, and a sharing practice rather than a trade.
So what does this have to do with Data Privacy Day, you ask? By participating in the online world—whether it’s sharing photos on Facebook, buying something from Etsy, applying to a job through Workopolis or tweeting what you ate for breakfast—we are exposing varying degrees of information about ourselves. We create an online identity. Albrechtslund (2008) states that “to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.” It is important to be conscious of just how much you are sharing, and be a “good steward of data” (National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013).
I think this is an important conversation to be had. I have witnessed many instances of thoughtless overshares on Facebook and Twitter. Of course there is lots of discussion about [insert social networking site here] is abusing our privacy, but we should also be talking about how we abuse our own privacy. I also think information professionals are poised to facilitate this discussion and can serve as a fount of knowledge. I have seen libraries that offer social media instruction (Facebook 101 and the like). How about online privacy 101?
The National Cyber Security Alliance has a wide range of resources for parents, teens and youth, educators, businesses, international resources, and just plain-old-everybody.
Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2142/1949
National Cyber Security Alliance. (2013). About. Retrieved from http://www.staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/about/
Pearson, E. (2009). All the world wide web’s a stage: The persormance of identity in online social networks. First Monday, 14(3). Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127
