Privacy in Libraries in the Digital Age

If you have ever wanted to use the wifi at a coffee shop or library, you have probably had to click through a screen to do it. This screen might have shown you the network’s Terms of Service and prompted you to click an “I agree” button. These kinds of screens are called captive portals, and they interfere with wireless security without providing many user benefits. Captive portals are to blame for a number of security issues, especially when it comes to HTTPS websites. HTTPS is meant to prevent traffic interception, alteration, and impersonation by a third party. But captive portals work by doing exactly that: they intercept and alter the connection between the user and the site they are trying to visit. On an unencrypted HTTP connection, the user would not even notice this. But for sites secured with HTTPS, the web browser detects something or someone hijacking the connection (similar to a man-in-the-middle attack). This causes “untrusted connection” warnings about fake certificates for websites that users otherwise expect to be safe. Those copious unexplained “untrusted connection” warnings on a network with captive portals—essentially false-positive warnings about websites that are actually safe—can train users to adopt the dangerous habit of ignoring security warnings.

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How much is your privacy worth to you? Would you trade some of it for 20 cents off a gallon of gas at the market? Most people would say, “Absolutely not!” Privacy is a right that needs to be protected. I feel very strongly about protecting individual privacy, both personally and as a librarian — then I look down at the store loyalty cards hanging from my keychain and realize that I have compromised for the sake of convenience, too.

Privacy of patrons in libraries is a major component of intellectual freedom. This is especially true of students who use school libraries. Students should be afforded the same level of patron privacy in a school library as they would receive in a public library. This statement from the Library Privacy Guidelines for students should be the foundation of a school library student privacy policy: Safeguarding user privacy requires that staff keep all in-library use and reference questions confidential and assure that there is no monitoring by staff or peers of what students are reading, viewing, or researching while in the library. If there must be security cameras in a school library, they should be placed so they do not monitor the circulation desk so that student use of materials can be kept confidential. Additionally, if cameras are placed to view computers, they should not be placed in a way that the screens of monitors can be viewed. Most importantly, there should be clear policies that safeguard student privacy and specifically outline cameras and their usage in the school library setting.

Questions about how Google might use data gleaned from students’ online activities have dogged the company for years. “Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid,” said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps. Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Bram Bout, director of Google’s education unit, pointed to a Google privacy notice listing the categories of information that the company’s education services collect, like location data and “details of how a user used our service.”

Now that our privacy is worth something, every side of it is being monetized. We can either trade it for cheap services or shell out cash to protect it. It is increasingly seen not as a right but as a luxury good. When Congress recently voted to allow internet service providers to sell user data without users’ explicit consent, talk emerged of premium products that people could pay for to protect their browsing habits from sale. And if they couldn’t afford it? As one congressman told a concerned constituent, “Nobody’s got to use the internet.” Practically, though, everybody’s got to.

Increasingly, though, the library is the place where people trust—and use—not just the librarian at the help desk, but also the search engine, online catalogs, digital archives, and electronic databases. So when patrons come into the library to find out about a sexually transmitted disease, for example, they will likely find themselves interacting with the online library—a messy mixture of library-specific digital tools and broader Internet resources that create all sorts of privacy risks for patrons.

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Patrons of Erie County's public libraries have new tools at their disposal to better track their reading habits and manage their accounts.  But anyone who attempted to access some of the new features for the first time throughout January - such as saved title lists, saved searches, and borrowing histories - received the following message: "The feature you have selected is associated with personal data in your patron account. Such data may be accessed by law enforcement personnel without your consent. Do you wish to continue?" That message has since been amended for clarity. Mary Rennie, executive director of the Erie County Public Library, said law enforcement officials need a warrant to access the data, and that the library rarely gets requests for such records.

Library Privacy Checklists

Free ebook download “The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet.”