LTI’s Back-to-School Toolkit: Digital Privacy

Resources for empowering students and staff to protect their privacy

Posted on August 27, 2025 in Blog Posts

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LibTech Insights editor
A change password screen on a library computer

As August winds down and the school year winds up, we wanted to curate a list of some evergreen posts on LibTech Insights about digital privacy—an increasingly urgent topic. The proliferation of AI tools has sparked greater interest in digital privacy, as people offer more and more data to chatbots, both personal data and institutional data. These conversations are important to have with students and colleagues, and these posts offer ways of engaging with the topic of digital privacy.

Lessons for Privacy Literacy Instruction from Pew Research’s New Survey

This piece, based on Pew Research data about Americans’ digital privacy practices, offers a good starting point for thinking about the importance and difficulty of digital privacy. Many people care deeply about their privacy, but they also feel futile about securing it… and may not do a great job of trying. These tensions are worth exploring.

Developing a Library Fellowship for Privacy Literacy

This case study from Vanderbilt University about a library fellowship designed to help students think critically about privacy provides a nice bit of hope. Students are not indifferent to their privacy, and this offers a useful point where library staff can meet students and impart vital information literacy skills.

A woman changing her privacy settings thanks to her privacy literacy skills

How One Library Cultivated Student Agency and Research in Digital Privacy

This follow-up interview with two librarians at Vanderbilt gives more insight into the fellowship program. It covers students’ approach to the topic of privacy and how fellows shared the findings of their research projects with the rest of the student body.

From Google Analytics to Matomo: Preserving Patron Privacy in Web Analytics

It isn’t enough to teach digital privacy; libraries must also align their practices to reflect their values. Chad Haefele makes the case for switching from Google Analytics to Matomo to protect patrons’ privacy. His post offers a good overview of this software.

Why Privacy Literacy Is Crucial to Student Success

Alexandrea Glenn and Emily Zoe Mann take discussions of privacy literary even further by arguing for its importance to student success. They highlight why librarians are well-poised to take on this work and identify areas where librarians can begin integrating privacy literacy into work they already do.

A librarian preparing for AI bots

Protecting Library Websites from AI Bot Traffic

Library websites have been hard hit by AI bots, scraping the internet for data. This podcast episode covers the problem and how Emory University attempted to mitigate it. This episode highlights the increasing stakes of data privacy practices and the information the libraries put out on the open web.

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