Privacy, the Next Challenge
By Karen G. Schneider
American Libraries Columnist
Director of the Garfield Library in Brunswick, New York, and author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for August 1999
The rapid onset of a near-ubiquitous online environment has led librarians to ask important questions, such as how we support the information have-nots of an informated society with our increasingly limited resources. These, unfortunately, are the easy questions, readily answered by throwing money at them. The difficult questions are just now becoming apparent. Among them: Will we—should we—can we protect patron privacy in an online environment?
Our background as librarians may have given us a false sense of security that has obscured the urgency of this question. Right now, in most cases, we and our patrons can still move in and out of libraries anonymously, roam stacks freely without informing anyone of who we are or why we are there, and peruse books and magazines without having our actions recorded. Public computers are usually available to patrons anonymously, as well. Unless you do a fiscal transaction (such as placing an order on Amazon.com) at a public computer, you, as an individual, are largely private.
With our historic ethical commitment to patron privacy, most libraries go to great lengths not to capture patron information, so that the use of our resources is “free from government intrusion, intimidation, or reprisal,” as ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Manual recommends. But we are probably swimming against the tide.
The movie version of Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel Fahrenheit 451 has an intriguing subtext: the portrayal of the serious cultural decay that results when personal privacy is no longer possible. The loss of privacy not only facilitates the government’s censorship efforts, but leads to widespread malaise and depression. The enormous, watchful monitors that follow nearly every private discussion and action are more terrifying than any bookburning scene in the movie.
Though this vision is extreme, it is really (like all good science fiction) just a continuum of reality. Our personal and public lives are becoming public information at a pace and to an extent few of us predicted even five years ago. When we interact with the Internet at home or at work, we accept increasingly high levels of personal intrusion. We register for access to many sites; cookies silently track our activities; providers gather and share who knows how much information about who we are and what we do. Library computers are a loophole, in that sense, and one that many different interest groups will be targeting to close through authentication tools and procedures.
I know August isn't “crystal ball” season, but I have a prediction: Sooner rather than later, we are going to have a digital “presence” just as we have an analog presence. We will have to “show I.D.” to get around the Web, not unlike the way we do in real life—and public computers will not be exempt from this requirement. We won't be able to sit down at a library computer and anonymously travel the Web any more than we can drive a car without a license. And it wouldn’t surprise me if in our lifetime we end up with a uniform personal registration, such as the “identity implants” featured in Nicola Griffith's excellent science-fiction novel Slow River.
Ditch your false sense of security
When I first discussed this with a colleague, she pointed me to a Web site that offered methods for disabling current authentication tools. I’m not impressed, because I don’t see future authentication tools coming from any technology currently available. What we have now is kids’ stuff. As Gail Sacco, director of Voorheesville (N.Y.) Public Library, put it, “All kids under 12 are Intel-ready, anyway,” and not likely to be daunted by some crude registration tool designed by old folks like us.
Looking around the corner, I see a single licensing tool, probably government-based, in the same way that we now have several core documents in our analog lives—Social Security cards, driver’s licenses—used to establish identity. (I would agree with people who say that Social Security cards shouldn’t be used for identification, but the reality is that far too often they are used for just that purpose.)
I’m not endorsing the idea of a uniform identity tool; I’m just predicting it. It’s not a hard call, given how identification tools circumscribe and imprint the rest of our lives. What is harder to predict is the impact of such control and lack of privacy on our individual souls and collective consciousness. Will it be the dreary public landscape of Fahrenheit 451, or is there still time to champion rules and guidelines that will ensure the right to read is not made moot by the loss of all privacy?
Where do we go from here?
We have some choices. We can trivialize the issue and hope it goes away, as many librarians initially did with the Internet. We can pass resolutions at conferences that criticize invasions of personal privacy without addressing the technology and legislation that will make our flowery phrases moot. We can uncritically endorse the concept of online identification, in concert with most censors, who would like to see most people’s lives over-identified and rigidly controlled.
Or we can decide that concerns about online privacy are classic librarianship, given our history of protecting the freedom to read, and begin work now on the problems posed by our changing environment. Two groups within ALA—the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services and the Library and Information Technology Association—have been discussing these concerns. We can teach these issues in library school; discuss them online; explore them in personal conversations. We can make this our issue. Whatever we do, we cannot ignore the future; it will not ignore us.
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