I'm very much in agreement with this—and hello Karl! Library patrons should
have the option—even the default—of keeping their data, and getting benefit
from it.
In such a context, however, and without being alarmist, I think special care
need to be made to design systems that provide the benefits of data sharing
without incurring too many of the risks.
There are, of course, software ways to do this. You can write software that
can't be exploited. But software is *hard*. And ILSs are hardly the cutting
edge when it comes to security. The average Sirsi installation is
seven-years old, or so I hear. It might be running on any of a dozen or more
OSes and databases. I doubt many are up-to-date on patches and so forth. I
think it would be worrying to simply "append" serious social networking onto
that sort of system.
I'm not an expert in security, but one of the most important tools is
*separation*. Most ecommerce companies, for example, store credit card
numbers separately from other custom data, and often divide the credit card
numbers between two machines. When something just needs to be checked, they
process checksums, rather than sending around the actual data. In the same
way, I think it's useful to separate core patron data—PINs, addresses,
etc.—from social networking data, much of it user generated and therefore a
welter of potential hacks and exploitations.
Again, I don't want to be an alarmist. Nor do I always toe my own line.
LibraryThing itself is not programmed to the highest standards of possible
security. We even say in our TOS that we don't absolutely guarantee data
privacy for the ~5% of members with private libraries—we're not Amazon, and
*they* had an incident when all their "private" reviews were exposed. But
our systems are separate. Our payment system is all through PayPal, and no
PayPal data is stored in our databases. And members are not required to
provide any real information about themselves; most don't even provide
emails and none provide addresses, drivers licenses and so forth—exactly the
sort of information a library has to have.
Tim
On 1/27/08, Karl Maria Fattig <kfattig_at_bowdoin.edu> wrote:
>
> Agreed totally. There's a great article for LJ waiting to be written
> titled: The Wrongs of Privacy. I'm not suggesting that libraries throw
> out our sensitive and nuanced understanding of a library user's
> rights. But can we at least realize that there are some advantages for
> users to sharing (in a limited way) some information that would
> normally be considered "private"
>
> Karl Maria
>
>
> On Jan 25, 2008, at 3:47 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
>
> >>
> > This question is worth asking. I'm scratching my head as to why we
> > believe people should have much greater privacy expectations when
> > using a library than when using a credit card, email, ecommerce site,
> > or just about any other service. As a group, we librarians seem to
> > think our data and technology-based services require enough privacy to
> > satisfy any black helicopter conspiracy theorist.
> >
> >
> > We need to be concerned about appropriate use of data, but over the
> > past few years we've gone over the deep end.
>
> karl maria fattig / systems and digital initiatives librarian /
> bowdoin college library
> kfattig_at_bowdoin.edu
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Sun Jan 27 2008 - 22:40:20 EST