In June and July 2016 the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) conducted a brief e-mail survey of its college and university members on authentication and authorization practices related to sharing user information with library-licensed external content providers (publishers, platform providers and aggregators). The survey was sent to member representatives at some 188 institutions representing both the library and information technology organizations. We asked about both technical and contractual approaches to the control and management of this data. We wanted to ascertain the extent to which information about individual users of licensed content was being passed to content providers, and if so, what measures were being taken to control this data, to determine the extent to which privacy concerns in this area were or were not being addressed by higher education institutions.
The results of the survey are now available here:
https://www.cni.org/go/report-authentication-survey-2016
I would be happy to answer any questions about this report.
My thanks to the CNI member representatives and others at those institutions for taking the time to provide such informative responses.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI