Librarians Fight for Our Privacy

I have a soft spot in my heart for libraries and librarians. I didn’t realize that privacy rights are one of the battlegrounds where they fight for us.

Sounds extreme, right? Well, companies that got their start as academic publishers have spent the last several decades transforming themselves into hugely profitable data analytics firms. Elsevier, for example, owns ScienceDirect, the premier database of peer-reviewed journals. It is a subsidiary of RELX, a global data broker that also owns LexisNexis and collects massive databases of personal information it then sells to government agencies and businesses to use in algorithms for things like policing, insurance, and banking.

Librarians Are Waging a Quiet War Against International “Data Cartels” | The Markup

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