mission responsible #11: librarians are privacy champions

For this month’s edition of Mission: Responsible, we spoke with Alison Macrina of Library Freedom Institute, an organisation dedicated to teaching librarians about privacy rights, surveillance threats and digital tools to thwart surveillance. Alison talked to us about the allyship between librarians and responsible data, what translating privacy-related topics to a community looks like and the ripple effect that comes with training community champions. 

privacy & the library: an unlikely allyship

During the summer of 2013, Alison was working as a librarian just outside of Boston when news about the Snowden revelations broke, dominating conversations across the globe and within the librarian community. “It makes sense to think about [privacy] in the context of libraries”, Alison explained to us. “Libraries provide free computer instruction and other educational programmes. There are ways to incorporate library work with privacy education.” 

Not long after, Alison decided to combine her work as a librarian with conducting trainings on privacy through an initiative that would later evolve into Library Freedom Project. Today, the organisation’s flagship program is Library Freedom Institute, a 4-month-long training program for librarians in the United States to learn about privacy, advocacy and power–and how these concepts intersect with their work. “The commitment to privacy is already there, and it informs a lot of the work that happens in libraries”, Alison said. 

Libraries, as Shannon Mattern wrote in 2014, have “always been a place where informational and social infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally) supports that program”, and libraries themselves have always connected knowledge and power. Library Freedom Institute is bringing new challenges about access, knowledge and power to the forefront, by talking about privacy rights and how digital technologies affect that intersection. What does the right to access to knowledge, combined with the right to privacy, look like in today’s modern library? 

embedding responsible data into a community’s context

A key part in operationalising responsible data lies in understanding the context and extending empathy to the community you are working with. Library Freedom Institute’s training programme does exactly that, by bringing questions related to privacy and ethical use of data into libraries and helping librarians understand what it is they should know about the responsible use of data and technology.
 

Another stimulus to enable community engagement with responsible data practices lies in the design of accessible and user-friendly resources. Library Freedom Project showcase how translating complex information into friendly formats can catalyse learning. Their public resources touch on topics like privacy policies, data protection and stalkerware through zines, posters, bookmarks, flyers and more. Through these friendly formats, they invite librarians to activate their knowledge on these topics and share it with their community. The Engine Room’s work with the American Association for the Advancement of Science provides more examples of user-friendly design with these decision trees that help guide practitioners through questions they should ask when using geo-located information. You can also see this in Oxfam’s Responsible Data Management toolkit, which includes card games and posters. In our experience, RD topics are often perceived as complicated or separate to someone’s ‘main’ work. Coming up with creative communication formats like these makes advocating for good practices easier and inspires interest from individuals and communities. 

from community champions to a community of learners

In the end, LFI’s training programme lays the groundwork for a community-based learning space from which community champions can emerge. Participants are invited to learn from each other and allies outside of the program–privacy advocates with hands-on experience advocating for security and equity in their communities–thereby connecting with people who work to protect other rights, too. Library Freedom Institute will soon kick off its third cohort. Former participants of the program continue to collaborate and support each other’s projects: “The two cohorts will continue to work on as one big group”, said Alison. 

The librarians can now be found teaching privacy classes, co-creating resources to help illustrate privacy concepts to their broader community, and, most importantly, supporting communities in becoming more secure and privacy-conscious. 

As always, feedback, suggestions and links for the next newsletter are very much welcomed.

You can get in touch with us at hello@responsibledata.io, which goes to The Engine Room team members Paola Verhaert, Laura Guzmán and Zara Rahman.