On 2-Feb-08, at 1:08 PM, Melinda Gottesman wrote:
> If we don't care about people knowing what we buy, who we talk to,
> or what we eat - why should we care about people knowing what we read?
You don't care if someone is able to track and access without a
warrant records of what you buy, who you talk to and what you eat? I
sure do!
To take just one example, records of who you talk to on the phone are
governed by privacy law, and the American people seem to be quite
clear on the fact that they should be. That's what this whole NSA
domestic wiretapping scandal is about, the fact that it is not okay to
have the government secretly monitoring communication traffic of its
own citizens without any law enforcement reason to do so. Do I really
need to go into why it's bad to have secret police monitoring
everyone's conversations?
I know you're talking about social networking, not the police state,
and I do take your point that libraries can sometimes seem to go
overboard with information privacy, especially in the age of facebook
where it does seem like many patrons want to share their data.
However, given that the federal government seems to think library
records are important enough to pass laws about accessing them, and
given that libraries have built up an expectation of privacy
concerning library records, I very much want to err on the side of
respecting privacy, even if it means we can't roll out social
networking software as quickly or easily as we'd like to.
I believe there are work-arounds that will let us engage in the web
2.0 and deliver the kinds of services you mention without compromising
library ethics concerning privacy. For example, giving patrons tools
to CHOOSE to publish any given book they've read at the library to
their blog, or my space account, or what have you. That way you're
giving them an explicit choice for every book (so I don't turn it on
generally and then forget about it when I go to check out something I
don't want all my friends knowing about... or worse, choose not to
check that book out at all because I'm afraid of public scrutiny), and
the records are maintained by someone else so libraries aren't put in
the position of compromising our long-standing expectation of privacy
regarding circulation records.
So no tomatoes, but I do think there are more productive ways to frame
the conversation than simply saying privacy in libraries is outdated.
Cheers,
Bess
Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler
Research and Development Librarian
Digital Scholarship Services (DSS)
Box 400129
Alderman Library
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
Received on Sat Feb 02 2008 - 21:15:40 EST