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Anonymous Library Cards An Option?
Ben Ostrowsky writes "On the heels of the possibility of requiring fingerprinting to use library resources, librarians don't like hoarding personally identifiable information; many are keenly aware of privacy concerns. Now it appears that anonymous library cards may be a possibility on the horizon. Tell your librarian you want to be anonymous!" From the article: " You've seen anonymous cash cards already; you may even have received them before. They're better known as gift cards. Using the same principle, libraries can issue a borrower card that uses cash, rather than personal ID information, as collateral. Here's an example: If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value."
..because the "resources" that they speak of in the link only talks about requiring fingerprints to access computers, similar to re-entering your password when you go to bid on something at ebay, just to make sure you are you. Unless im mistaken, you would have to have the balance of a PC on your card to use what you are being fingerprinted for, so why not just have cards that don't need to be fingerprinted, and those accounts can only use the paper resources of a library?
Because A) Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book, even temporarily. One of the benefits of libraries is that the books are for everyone and not just us rich snobs who go to barnes and nobles every day. B) Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest. Sure, it's only for a few weeks, but that money can add up fast (see: Office Space, Superman, etc).
These fingerprint scans for PC use are a stupid idea implemented by some town in Ill. I've never heard of. I'm sure that program won't fly...
Let's stop creating solutions for problems that don't exist. We have enough real problems in the US that need solutions...
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I work in a library. $20 is a small fine... many users end up with over $50, and I've seen hundreds owing (it's not that hard.. lose 4 hardcovers and that's nearly $200 right there). I would only think this would work if the deposit was much higher.. but of course then no one would use it.
Thats great if you want to turn the library into a bookstore. Dropping $15 (or whatever) for a book is no big deal for some people and they will feel no obligation to return the book.
i have an interesting story regarding my friend's incident at the airport security. at the security checkpoint, my friend was about to walk through the metal detector. he had on white sneakers, which usually aren't required to be taken off.
the metal detector guard asked if my friend wanted to take off his shoes. he didn't request it, just asked if he wanted to. my friend, being lazy, of course said he'd rather just walk through. the moment he expressed this, he was asked for follow the guard and they went into one of those corners and he closed the drapes around him and did a full body search (no cavity search though).
either way, by saying you want an anonymous card is similar to this situation, where you have the option to, but you'll be more suspicious for them to check you out, probably finding stuff about you that they wouldn't have else known.
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The library has no way to contact the homeless person and tell them a book is being held, so the homeless person needs to stop in each day to see if the book has been returned. That's no different than a homeless person currently checking in each day to see if something popular is available for them to read on the premises.
The big problem with these $1 cards is that someone who doesn't want the public to read a book could buy a bunch of them and say "hold this book for me", then never return to read it. That would prevent the library from loaning the book out to other people so they could read it.
I would say that all librarians are very concerned about privacy issues. My IS degree was thru the graduate library school (so I had to take a few courses there) and the first thing they taught was that what and if somebody reads is that person's business and no one else's. The librarian has an interest in the book (and it being returned promptly) but not in the person or what they do with the book within their allotted time.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
They're also known as cash, money, coins, etc and predate magnetic stripes on pieces of platic by thousands of years. And they aren't subject to expiration dates and can be used at any retailer.
Librarians as a profession (http://ala.org/) are privacy conscious. That doesn't necessarily mean that the policies of an individual public library, funded and run by the local political system, will be.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Well, sometimes librarians are the only ones fighting for you to keep having some of these rights and not having your reading habits looked through.
They seem to be the only ones who really appreciate the issues involved in the freedoms involved. Oft-times it's counrt challenges made by them that preserves such freedoms.
By protecting your currently held rights to read what you want with privacy you legitimise attacks on your privacy?
That's effectively saying that you concede that only criminals would want to keep things private from the government, so not-guilty people have nothing to hide.
The US constitution was designed to prevent this kind of state-control of the citizenry, not make everyone who tries to uphold it into an outlaw.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Remember the old, completely paper-driven library cards of 30+ years ago? The borrower's name was written on the card, and every borrower before them was on a permanent list. No anonymity there at all. More recently, you were issued a bar-coded card that tracked what you borrowed against your name. No anonymity there, either (because, if you don't return the book, they need to know who's running around with a $50 copy of a coffee-table Leonardo DaVinci collection, or whatever).
Now, you walk into a library, as you've been able to do for centuries, pull a book off the shelf, sit down, and read it. Put it back. There's no tracking involved, never has been (except perhaps at the Library Of Congress and some other huge collections where you have to put in a request for the book to be brought out - and there's been no anonymity there, either). But if you want to walk away with the book, they want to know who's got it. Why is that a bad thing? If you want to temporarily take posession of something that the taxpayers paid for (or which was donated to the community by a private party), it's certainly reasonable for the community to have in place a way to get hold of that person when they don't return the item, or to charge them a fee if they hang onto it for longer than is reasonable.
Now, you walk into a library and want to use the internet. Fine. But suppose your entire purpose of using that service is to phish, defraud, or otherwise be bad? If some merchant somewhere tracks a fraud attempt, or a bank tracks the use of a stolen credit card back to an IP address mapped to a machine in a facility provided by taxpayers, isn't it reasonable to be able to figure out who was driving at the time they were committing a crime? The fingerprinting issue was about computer use. Biometrics are about making sure you are who you say you are, so that lifting an acquaintence's card doesn't allow you to commit crimes in her name using public facilities.
That said, I don't think I'd want a bored IT intern at a library able to troll through proxy logs and see, by name, who was looking at what on the web. Biometrics should just be a hash, and that sort of log data should be just like financial transaction data, with need-to-know one-way storage. Yes, that can be cracked. But so can everything if you can't trust anyone, ever. If a municipality, county, or school wants to continue to offer free computer/net use, but wants to mitigate the obviously real risk of people running scams from their network, they should certainly have the option of doing something about it. It's all about transparency, though: letting the users know what's being collected when they sign on, and generally how it's being protected and under what circumstances (subpeona, etc) it can be retrieved.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
First of all, the 'value' of the material you check-out should be increased from the purchase price. I regularly use inter library loan to get materials that are next to impossible to find otherwise. If this system was anonymous and the price of CD say was $15, then all of the obscure music would quickly vanish from circulation. You would need to increase the value to say $60 to discourage stealing.
The way that libraries counteract stealing now is that they have a dollar limit above which they do not lend further materials out to you and you can only have one library card per name address pair. So even if the value is comparable to real world cost, the fact that you can only steal a limited amount before you can return to steal more, and the fact that if you steal enough at one time they will put you in collection work well enough to prevent casual theft.
Already at that increased value rate for the card, this would turn-away most people. But say that they did not mark-up the value, just wait until you have three kids like I do. Right now I have some twenty odd books/videos/CDs checked-out from the library near my home. I also have two movies, two books, and 11 CDs that I am returning today to the library near my work. I do not even know how much my wife has checked-out, but she is a pretty voracious reader too. Think about how much money we would need to set aside for that.
So why is this being proposed? It looks like it is a solution to the wrong end of the problem. The real problem are the laws that force libraries to turn-over information. So guess what the solution is? Yes that's right, change those laws.
And may I ask, how do you know that I don't contribute to Wiki? Because as a matter of fact I do. [...] Why don't you stop making assumptions (because you know what they say about assumptions) and take a reality check.
I'm not making assumptions, I just don't respect the "get your priorities straight / think of the children" posts (your post being an independant entity from you, btw) because they never contribute anything to the discussion. Off course there are other problems in life, more pressing, more life threatning, etc.
If you're going to say there are more pressing matters to this thread, why not write a macro that'll post the exact same thing to every. single. thread. up until such times as hunger, war and disease have been wiped out from the world? Might as well.
You can't take the sky from me...
Let's say libraries had the resources to implement this. There is no replacing an out-of-print book, even if it originally cost less that the deposit amount.
-- We live in a kakistocracy.
If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value.
Borrowing The Terror State from your local library: $20
Parking your car anywhere: $50
Fast lane at the airport, bypassing extra security checks: $100k
Bypassing all important security checks: $10m
Bypassing all security checks and paying for it with American oil money: priceless.
--Bud
But seriously, are you suggesting we should have universal anonymity with universal trust? You must be mad. Did you follow the 'white bicycle' and 'green bicycle' experiments?
Anyway, the 'rich' (in this case those with 20 bucks to spare) only get to be anonymous by forfeiting access to some of their money.
You might as well complain that parking schemes are only for the benefit of those who can afford a car.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I would only think this would work if the deposit was much higher.. but of course then no one would use it.
Elite Level: For a fee large enough that only rich people (and well-funded cells) will pay it, you can have a library card not traceable to you (until you show up to use it again).
Comrade Level: For free-as-in-police-state, you can have a library card that logs every transaction you make. (Future upgrades will upload the logs directly to DCS1000.)
The surveillance situation in this country is just wrong and it keeps getting wronger(TM), but look where this solution leads us: two classes of access. The principle of libraries is that free public access to information improves society. Free -- not paid, not surveilled -- free.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Most of the only time knowing what the bad guys did at a library is only helpful after the fact, but that can help a lot.
All of this is based on the theory that government is honest, never makes mistakes and always lives up to the principles laid out in the Constitution by our founding fathers.
The truth falls well short of this - during my lifetime there have been multple large scale abuses of power by the federal govenerment - and I think history will show the Patriot Act to fall into that category.
And pray, tell me WHY reading a book, no matter how inflamartory should make one bit of difference in a criminal context? This is surely only a back door towards eroding some of our most basic freedoms - of speech and the press.
What next, are we going to record how individuals voted in the elections? Surely, if you vote for a Muslim candidate that must mean you have terrorist leanings, right? And don't laugh - people lost everything during the McCarthy era simply because they associated with somebody who belonged to the wrong political party. Look at the case of Robert Oppenhiemer.
We live in an era where there have been many proposals by agents of the goverment to establish centralized databases full of data characterizing the actions and behaviors of citizens without any restraint on who gets cataloged. There is a bill before Congress right now that would mandate a national id card.
Can you imagine how data of that nature would have been misused by the likes of McCarthy and Nixon?
No, rather than this incessant data gathering and spying that seems to be the idea of moment (and in reality it signals victory by the terrorists who want to destroy our way of life) we should be working to STRENGTHEN the erosions of privacy that are occurring in the digital age.
Anonymous library cards are a WONDERFUL idea.
Some people prefer not to, and get a card with features that reduces their potential loss at the cost of it being possible to trace transactions, and other prefer to walk around with anything from a few small bills to large wads of high denomination bills.
Why does it have to be either/or?
Except that if you check out a book non-anonymously, you have no right to privacy beyond the transaction. The government can see that you're checking out perfectly legal books from a public library and use it to build a case* to arrest or further invade you. The government has so far not said "The library must keep track of this information", it has only said "The library must turn over what information it keeps track of". So, yes, in this case anonymity is the only way to preserve your privacy.
*"OMFG NOBODY IS BEING ARRESTED FOR CHECKING OUT A BOOK U MORON" == irrelevent, not actually related to what I said. Beware of magic qualifying words: they need to be read for the sentence to work.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I would describe the the first few years of my (way too young) marriage as "first world poverty", we were easily in the bottom 20% bracket. I lost access to the library because I could not afford to pay the fine for a misplaced book. My answer was "op-shops" and second hand books, I never went without smokes because I rolled my own and to this day (25yrs later) I am still addicted. The biggest problem with being poor is that you get oh-so-fucking-sick of scrimping and chasing work. When you occasionally get a wad of cash you stock the cuboards, pay the red bills, get new clothes for the kids and blow the rest on a dirty weekend because you just want a break from it, even for a day.
I agree 100% with your sentiments (except poor does not imply uneducated), if you really want privacy you will find the $50 (~2 slabs in Australian money). If you are that dirt poor that you can't afford it then simply read the book in the library, trust me, you will have the spare time and it will cut down your smoking (librarians frown on that type of thing in thier library).
Librarians are a powerfull force in upholding everyones right to read Chairman Mao, the Koran, the Bible, the Unabomer's manifesto, Osama BL's diatribes or anything we fucking feel like. The interest from a single account would amount to the best part of nothing to anyone living in a country that has local libraries in the first place. If the system became popular, (no offence but I'm sure you would get takers in the US), the total interest could be a tidy sum and used to enhance what I consider is a service at the core of any "free" civilization.
To all the naysayers that are throwing up red herrings such as poverty what is the alternative besides the current status-quo (ie: no option of annonomous accounts for anyone)?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm not a big fan of the PATRIOT Act, but I'm always apalled by the number of people, and who pontificate on its provisions without actually reading them! The referenced article states " Unfortunately, if an over-zealous special agent on a fishing expedition wants to know ... the librarian will probably have little choice. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, he or she would have to surrender the personal identity information that was originally collected to protect the library's materials."
This just isn't true! If you are going to express opinions on the PATTRIOT Act then try reading some of it so that your opinion is based on fact. The pertinent section of the PATRIOT Act is Title II section 215
Anyone notice the part about it not applying to activities protected by the first ammendment? Or the part about needing a warrant from a judge? Or the part about the agent needing to have a particular rank to pursue a library inquiry?
Here is the text of section 215, although a download of the PDF serves much better:
"SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT. Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861 et seq.) is amended by striking sections 501 through 503 and inserting the following: ''SEC. 501. ACCESS TO CERTAIN BUSINESS RECORDS FOR FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM INVESTIGATIONS. ''(a)(1) The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution. ''(2) An investigation conducted under this section shall-- ''(A) be conducted under guidelines approved by the Attorney General under Executive Order 12333 (or a successor order); and ''(B) not be conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. ''(b) Each application under this section-- ''(1) shall be made to-- ''(A) a judge of the court established by section 103(a); or ''(B) a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court; and 50 USC 1861. ''(2) shall specify that the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2) to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. ''(c)(1) Upon an application made pursuant to this section, the judge shall enter an ex parte order as requested, or as modified, approving the release of records if the judge finds that the application meets the requirements of this section. ''(2) An order under this subsection shall not disclose that it is issued for purposes of an investigation described in subsection (a). ''(d) No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section. ''(e) A person who, in good faith, produces tangible things under an order pursuant to this section shall not be liable to any other person for such production. Such production shall not be deemed to constitute a waiver of any privilege in any other proceeding or context."
ACLU-fantasized????
How about Supreme Court established. There is no provision in the Constitution to abridge the rights spelled out therein because you want to. That's what MCarthy tried to do, and the climate at the time allowed him to get pretty far with it.
The consequences of the first and fourth ammendments is that you have a rock solid right to read these things, hang out with other people who have read these things, and be free of extra-ordinary scrutiny for having read these things.
One thing you'll find about attorneys/groups that vigilantly defend these freedoms, is a willingless to defend the ability of people to say controversial things. I may not side with, for example, white supremecists. But I sure as hell defend their right to advocate such positions -- as long as it stops short of incitement to do violence and the like.
The reason is simple -- those rights in your Constitution (I'm not American) are intended to be absolute and guaranteed to everyone. Not the ones who are politically sanitized and sanctioned by the current administration.
The laws of the US are founded on a moral authority. When you selectively apply that law, you erode that moral authority -- kind of like what the current administration seems to be happy to do. In the long-run, your constitution will prevail. In the short run, people keep trying to do an end-run around it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.