PREPARING THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRIVACY LEADERS? The Intersection of Business Ethics and Privacy Education

Library professionals consider patron privacy core to our work. It is codified for library workers in the ALA Code of Ethics and for library users in the Library Bill of Rights. Beyond library spaces, however, privacy becomes murkier. The amount of data gathered about us by others, with and without our express consent, grows exponentially each year. For many businesses, gathering, packaging, analyzing, and selling this data is the foundation of their business models. There are no similar profession-wide codes of ethics that guide what businesses should or should not do with our data; a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, proposed by the Obama administration, was never adopted. In the United States, very few legal protections or guidelines act as safeguards. Instead, consumers must often rely on their own understanding of privacy protections.