People-centered Privacy Education

Privacy, understood as one’s calibrated accessibility to others, is a necessary condition for fostering personal and shared identities and exercising individual and collective agency. Privacy literacy entails conceptual knowledge, practical skills, and social attitudes for managing one’s personal information and understanding its role in the information ecosystem and in society. This poster highlights the emergence of library-based privacy education programming and invites feedback on practitioner-facing works-in-progress resulting from Libraries Stand for Privacy: National Forum for Privacy Literacy Standards and Competencies. The spring 2025 national forum convened more than fifty privacy literacy educators from public, school, and academic libraries in the United States and Canada, along with allied LIS scholars and independent information professionals, who engaged in hybrid, participant-led roundtable and working group sessions to ideate professional competencies and learning standards for privacy education programming in libraries. Following the forum, select working groups analyzed artifacts from these participatory research sessions, including both individual- and group-authored notes, to develop draft consensus frameworks, competencies, and practitioner resources for coordinating privacy literacy programming in libraries across the K-20 education spectrum. Attendees will learn effective strategies for implementing hybrid participatory research methods that are inclusive to library workers from all institution types, and will gain access to pilot practitioner materials to support library-based privacy literacy programming for review and feedback. Attendees will also gain appreciation for the importance of privacy to intellectual freedom, individual agency and identity, and collective action for social justice, and for how library-based privacy literacy programming can enrich a privacy-conducive culture.