Beth Given's Profile

We have an unfortunate tendency to conflate personal and private with secret and we say, "Well, given that this information isn't a secret, given that it's known by other people, how can you say that it's private?" And we can in fact say that there are a lot of things that are in secret that are in private. Every one of us does something private and not secret when we go to the bathroom. Every one of us has parents who did at least one private thing that's not a secret, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

And a specialist in delivering information and connecting people with information, we should be deeply skeptical of this. I go so far as to say libraries have a moral duty to boycott technologies that do this to their patrons because it's in no one's interest to have this information—better not have the information in the stacks than to have it in a way that embodies a snitch, a curtain twitcher that watches every word that you read, every line you consume, and has the capacity to report it back to a mother ship.