Michael Zimmer is a

privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

and data ethics scholar. He currently is an

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a ...

in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University. 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. Zimmer is on the advisory board of the

Future of Privacy Forum The Future of Privacy Forum is a Washington DC based think tank and advocacy group focused on issues of data privacy. It is jointly supported by corporate sponsors and foundations. Corporate members include AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Inteli ...

, and was on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2009-2016. He was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School from 2007-2008. Zimmer has criticized the research ethics of a

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

-sponsored research project that harvested the Facebook profiles of an entire cohort of undergraduate students. He has appeared on the National Public Radio shows '' Science Friday'' and Morning Edition. Zimmer appeared in the "Is My Cellphone Spying On Me?" commentary accompanying the DVD release of '' Eagle Eye'' 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 Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...

. Zimmer published a critique of Zuckerberg in '' The Washington Post'' to commemorate Facebook's 10th anniversary. In 2021, Zimmer was named among experts advising ''

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'' regarding the release of

The Facebook Papers In 2021, an internal document leak from the company then known as Facebook (now Meta Platforms, or Meta) showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms. The leak, released by whistleblower Frances Haugen, resulted in report ...

Selected publications

* ''Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts'', Peter Lang, 2017

References

External links

Personal homepage

Marquette University profile

“But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook
''Ethics and Information Technology'', 2010
The Zuckerberg Files
Yale Information Society Project Fellows {{US-legal-academic-bio-stub