Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Is the cost of increased personalization an invasion of privacy? Surely, to
understand users' needs we need to research them? In general, we do
not object to using supermarket store cards, but these are not for our
benefit, they are so that the store can see what we buy in order to better
market its products to us.
A recent blog from Tony Hirst, 'Why Private Browsing Isn't . . .',
discusses private browsing in the latest browsers, but then goes on to
discuss how Flash's 'Stored Objects', an equivalent to cookies, sits
outside private browsing and thus enables sites such as the BBC's
iPlayer to resume a programme if you change browser (Hirst, 2009).
Once again, the use of this data is not considered an invasion of privacy.
Jenny Walker suggests that librarians have been very cautious in this
area: 'To date, user information-seeking behaviour data has been largely
overlooked for enhancing library services, but steps are being taken in
this direction, such as the development of recommender services and
new metrics for scholarly evaluation' (Walker, 2009).
This chapter does not intend to tackle the finer points of data
protection and ethics, but rather to make the point that the use of
anonymized
data is the real issue. It is only through the use of
anonymized personal data that resource discovery can be
improved/personalized in the ways described above. The only real
concern is when a particular cohort is so small that usage can easily be
mapped to individuals.
Data Protection places significant demands on such an undertaking.
Submitted records will not include individual user details and will be
aggregated at the level of course/unit of study and item (e.g. book title).
Furthermore, in the data used to derive activity patterns ('users who did
this also did that'), lone transactions in a given group will also be
removed.
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The JISC MOSAIC (Making Our Shared Activity Information Count)
project plans to investigate the technical feasibility and issues around
exploiting data to assist resource discovery and evaluation in higher
education. Data is derived from:
