EDITOR'S NOTE
Privacy Please
by Brandi Scardilli
When you make a mental list of things you want to share with others and things you want to keep private, do you even think about your online activities? If it weren’t for the rise of social media, I bet a lot of people wouldn’t. The reality is that you have to make decisions about online privacy every day: Will you use your real name as part of a username? Will you open the private mode on your browser so your website visits aren’t tracked? Will you only visit sites that use HTTPS? Will you use a password management tool or stick to memorizing your logins?
Sometimes, the decisions are made for us, as in the case of the nearly 90 million Facebook users whose data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. Nancy Herther dives into the scandal and discusses how privacy and misinformation are handled by big tech companies (page 1). As she notes, the U.S. government is involved on a small scale—but the European Union has already released a new regulation designed to bring together data privacy law across the region. Kelly LeBlanc explains the major sections of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), lays out its misconceptions, and discusses the importance of complying with it (page 1).
When you do want to share online, it might be because it’s research that you think others need to know (or can expand on). Corilee Christou rounds out the page 1 feature articles with her exploration of Copyright Clearance Center’s OA Agreement Manager, which streamlines funding request workflows for publishers.
Happy reading!  |
