UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In our world of exploding technological complexity, protecting privacy online — our own and others’ — is more challenging than ever. Failure to do so may come with a hefty legal price tag: An October Reuters story reported that Google would pay up to $190 million in legal fees as part of a consumer privacy settlement exceeding $1 billion for collecting users’ personal data and tracking their locations without consent, among other transgressions.
It’s important to understand how to manage personal information in the digital world — a competency known as "privacy literacy." Academic librarians in particular are uniquely positioned to equip students with this knowledge, according to two Penn State University Libraries faculty members — Sarah Hartman-Caverly and Alexandria Chisholm, reference and instruction librarians at Berks Thun Library, Penn State Berks, and the editors of Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries (2023, Association of College and Research Libraries).
Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards, according to Hartman-Caverly and Chisholm. They agree that students “need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of the current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism.”
Privacy literacy involves a combination of factual knowledge about data protection and legal practices — the risks of sharing data, how it's collected and used, and how to protect it — as well as the procedural knowledge to apply strategies for personal privacy and make informed decisions about information sharing. A growing area of instruction and programming in educational library services, privacy literacy emphasizes making informed choices about managing one’s personal information and understanding its role in the information ecosystem.
In March of this year, Hartman-Caverly and Chisholm joined forces with Priya Kumar, PNC Career Development Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, on a collaborative effort to develop consensus national standards and competencies for privacy literacy work in libraries. The result was Libraries Stand for Privacy, a national project team that convened at University Park and virtually through a National Forum on Privacy Literacy Standards and Competencies. This project was made possible in part by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
The project and subsequent forum were conceived to address a primary responsibility of library workers who serve a variety of constituencies, including youth and family, K–12 schools and higher education.
“Practitioners need consensus standards and frameworks to guide the creation and assessment of privacy literacy learning experiences,” according to a fact sheet produced by the project team. “The library profession needs consensus professional competencies in privacy literacy to develop a workforce that can meet this growing societal need.”
Following the March forum, a working group of participants developed learner standards and practitioner competencies in a framework for privacy literacy, a roadmap for implementing privacy literacy programming, and other self-study materials for educators and advocates of privacy literacy. The complete suite of materials and resources is available online.
Libraries Stand for Privacy is seeking feedback through January 2026 on the following resources:
- Framework for Privacy Literacy
- Roadmap to Privacy Literacy Programming in the Library
- Privacy Literacy Self-Study Guidebook
Feedback is welcome via links embedded in each of the three topics from library workers, library and information science (LIS) faculty and graduate students, library patrons and the public.
Questions or concerns may be directed to Sarah Hartman-Caverly at smh767@psu.edu. For more information on Libraries Stand for Privacy and the National Forum on Privacy Literacy Standards and Competencies, visit the website.