User privacy is an often overlooked part of the work of web librarians. To support our researchers, we often subscribe to hundreds or third-party databases. These databases come with their own privacy policies, analytics, and data collection practices that affect our users. Often, our users are not informed about the decisions we have made on their behalf. A user could always hunt down the privacy policies located on each databases pages if they wanted, but they won't. So we did it for them.
Last semester, my Web Content Assistant Pooja and I hunted down all of the privacy policies governing every third party database or software solution the University subscribes to. There were 356 different vendor privacy policies we found.1
We used the GVSU CMS to create a searchable list of all of the privacy policies our users are subject to. You can see it at https://gvsu.edu/library/privacy.
We also have our accessibility and quality assurance tool, Silktide, pointed at these pages in case they are updated or the links change. If you want to see how vendor privacy policies change over time, we receommend seeing Cornell University Library's ArchiveIt Collection of privacy policies. We also took direction from the University of Denver Libraries' Privacy Policy page.
- Note that four of our vendors did not have privacy policies that were findable. We wrote to each, and one vendor created a privacy policy while the other three ignored us. The three without privacy polciies are:
- OTSeeker
- Scripta Sinica
- China Academic Journals