If its Public, It’s free…Right? (spoiler: No) (Lauren Fowler Week 6)

Ever wonder how many people have quietly stalked your Goodreads “to-read” shelf or that one regrettable Myspace photo that somehow still lives on the internet? If you just said “no,” congratulations! You’re living the ethical dream. The rest of us? We’re living in what  Dr. Sun discussion culminates as the era of constant data tracking.

This week we discussed social media ethics and privacy. Basically, all the messy questions about consent, data, and the blurry line between “public” and “private.” Researcher Michael Zimmer (2010) sings a perfect warning song with the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook study, where academics downloaded 1,700 students’ profiles because, well, the data was public. And the can. The problem? Those students didn’t actually consent to being part of a research project. Turns out, “public” doesn’t always mean “permission granted.”

Then there’s danah boyd and Kate Crawford (2012), who remind us that Big Data isn’t automatically good data, no matter what your people counter-obsessed library administrators tell you. Just because platforms collect massive amounts of information doesn’t mean that data is accurate, ethical, or unbiased. (Spoiler, again: it usually isn’t.) They warn that algorithms often reinforce inequalities rather than reveal truths. In a nutshell, your “For You Page” might be more “For Someone Else Who Looks Like You” than you think.

As librarians and information professionals, we often walk the tightrope of access and ethics. Privacy is important. Any library professional knows that! We want transparency, but not surveillance. Open data, but not exploitation. The real challenge is finding that balance, which is protecting patron privacy while still keeping libraries relevant in digital spaces that love oversharing.

So the next time someone says, “Relax, it’s public data,” remember Zimmer’s Facebook fiasco and boyd & Crawford’s mic drop: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

References

boyd, d., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679.

Sun, Y. (2025). Social media ethics and privacy [Lecture slides]. LIS 558: Social Media for Information Professionals, University at Buffalo.

Zimmer, M. (2010). “But the data is already public”: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4), 313–325.