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Privacy Writings & Research:

Background

Workplace Privacy Project

Investigative Documents

 

Privacy: Writings & Research

Background

Pam Dixon is the executive director and founder of the World Privacy Forum, a non-profit organization focused on conducting research on societal issues, particularly those where privacy intersects with technology.

The World Privacy Forum has issued a number of benchmarking studies. The first was the "2003 Job Search Privacy Study: Privacy in a Networked Environment," which was released November, 2003. The Forum issued a new study July 2004 on job fraud, A Year in the Life of a Job Scam: Pt. 1 of the World Privacy Forum Job Scam Report . Call Don't Click (2005) and Medical Identity Theft: The Information Crime that Can kill You (2006) are the most recent groundbreaking reports.

The job scam and job search reports are are part of the World Privacy Forum's Workplace Privacy Project, a large project that focuses on multiple aspects of workplace data privacy such as:

  • Job applicant privacy
  • Employee data privacy
  • Corporate privacy notices
  • Workplace monitoring
  • Trans-border flows of employee information
  • Privacy-reducing/enhancing technologies at work
  • Workplace communications privacy (email, IM, ...)

Prior to founding the World Privacy Forum, Dixon was a researcher at the Privacy Foundation during Richard M. Smith's tenure there. While there, her work focused on workplace and job applicant privacy, including a study on resume databases and the first study to document privacy issues in the online job search industry and online job searching sites.

A few Favorite Investigative Documents

An invoice proving the sale of nearly 5,000 job seekers' resumes from HotResumes.com. This should give everyone something to think about before posting a resume online, especially if the resume contains a permanent home address or a SSN.