(2023-11-07) Sparc Report Urges Action To Address Concerns With Sciencedirect Data Privacy Practices

SPARC Report Urges Action to Address Concerns with ScienceDirect Data Privacy Practices. Today, SPARC released Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect.

Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of “risk” products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier's ScienceDirect

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier's ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX's LexisNexis subsidiary.

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• Use of web beacons, cookies, and other invasive web surveillance methods to track user behavior outside and beyond the ScienceDirect website
• Extensive collection of a broad range of personal data (e.g., behavioral and location data) from ScienceDirect combined with personal data harvested from sources beyond ScienceDirect (i.e., third parties in and outside of RELX and data brokers as stated in Elsevier’s Privacy Policy and U.S. Consumer Privacy Notice)
• According to reporting, RELX risk products have been documented as being used in ways that raise serious concerns, including to help monitor protestors’ social media feeds,8 surveil immigrants,9 blackmail women,10 and help in attempting to manufacture false terrorism charges against some of those who participated in anti-racism protests in the summer of 2020.11,12