Michael Zimmer is a privacy

Privacy

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

 and social media

Social media

The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

 scholar. He currently is an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee School of Information Studies

The School of Information Studies is an academic unit of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The school offers Bachelor of Science, MLIS and Doctoral programs of Information sciences in the areas of Archival Studies, Information Organization, Information Policy, and Information Retrieval.The US...

 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is Wisconsin's premier public urban university. It is a coed public research university located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the United States. It is also the largest university in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and a member of the University of Wisconsin System...

, and co-director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Zimmer serves on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers

Association of Internet Researchers

Founded in 1999, the Association of Internet Researchers is an learned society dedicated to the advancement of the transdisciplinary field of Internet studies...

, and is on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum

Future of Privacy Forum

The Future of Privacy Forum is a United States public policy advocacy group set up to address privacy issues, seeking business practical best practices that benefit consumers. Co-chairman Jules Polonetsky was former chief privacy officer for AOL. The founder and co-chair is Christopher Wolf, a...

.

Zimmer was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education for his research criticizing the research ethics

Research ethics

Research ethics involves the application of fundamental ethical principles to a variety of topics involving scientific research. These include the design and implementation of research involving human experimentation, animal experimentation, various aspects of academic scandal, including scientific...

 of a Harvard

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

-sponsored research project that harvested Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 profiles of an entire cohort of undergraduate students. He has also appeared on the National Public Radio shows Science Friday and Morning Edition

Morning Edition

Morning Edition is an American radio news program produced and distributed by National Public Radio . It airs weekday mornings and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 05:00 to 09:00 ET, with feeds and updates as required until noon...

, as well as in the New York Times and other media outlets.

External links

• Personal homepage
• UW-Milwaukee profile
• “But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook, Ethics and Information Technology, 2010