It's interesting that records, such as library books read, that were common before the modern Internet are considered private, but if the records are related to the Internet, such as web pages read (or every place I go, everyone I talk to, everything I say, etc.), many people say they don't understand why their privacy is important.
I think this sums up the attitude of most of those confounded young'un Millennials, myself included.
I like the idea that Youtube remembers the videos I've watched so that it rec's others, it's a useful feature of the site. The fact that someone else, a person, could see that information, that is upsetting. It's probably difficult to have one without the other, however.
This has nothing to do with the OP / what library books were read. The library certainly does know what you read. Likewise, Google and even real people at Google may know what you watched. But that's not surprising. It's to be expected.
The real comparison is if Google gave that information, de-anonymized, to advertisers. Then there would be an issue.
Difficult but not impossible. Client side encryption on such data can fix this, but can be difficult to implement in a good way that is transparent to users. You can even still submit/keep anonymized information about videos viewed.
In almost every current business case it probably isn't worth it to bother.
Library records were not necessarily all that private.
When I was a kid/teen, each book in the county library had a card in a pocket glued or taped to the inside front cover of the book. Your library card had a metal plate on it embossed with your library card number. To check out a book you took it to the checkout counter, they took your library card and the card from the book, and used a machine that printed your library card number and the due date on that card from the book [1]. They kept that card, and put a card in the book that told you the due date.
When you returned the book, they would put that original card back in the pocket and return the book the the stacks.
Note that if you could obtain my library card number, then you could find out if I had checked out a particular book by simply finding that book on the shelves and looking at the checkout card to see if my library card number was printed on it. You could even tell when I checked it out because the due date would be listed. The card had enough room to store records from a couple dozen checkouts.
I think that this didn't bother people because it took some work to get the information. First, you need the target's library card number. One way you could get that would be to have someone watch me when I come out of the library and try to get a good enough look to identify a book I've checked out. Then wait until I return the book and it is back on the shelves, and you can get my number from the card.
Once you've got the card number, you now have to start looking in books for it. If you are trying to see if I'm reading books on a particular subject, you might reasonably look at all books on that subject, but if you are trying to get a general picture of all my reading that is going to be a big hassle.
A lot of things were like this--the data was not particularly protected or kept private, but because getting it required going to some particular place and trolling through printed records generally only people who had a really good reason to want it would go to the effort.
[1] Similar to the way credit cards worked back before electronic card readers.
There was a time before library card numbers. My public library was still having you sign the card when I was young. As I recall they jumped directly from that to keeping track of lending digitally.
I also look at how much potential is in the environment for consensus on my issues. I feel like if I cry aloud about people snooping into library records, I can reach high consensus on this issue with others. I will be able to tap into the energy of the environment.
But if I cry aloud about online / computer tracking, I believe I will get a very mixed response. Some people will stand with my issue, but too many will simply be bored with my issue. I don't think the environmental potential energy for this issue is strong enough.
That people would raise a cry over one issue and not another is not sufficient to diagnose their internal wants. It may also speak to their assessment of (probability) x (magnitude) of success.
So the Kobe daily dismisses the criticism by essentially claiming he's a public figure and thus fair game but also admit to not obtaining consent from the other book borrowers.
On the other hand, the information was obtained and "leaked" by someone who stumbled upon the library cards while disposing old books and ancillary things from an old library....
It reminds me of the cardfile case in New York[1] somewhere that brought insight into the lives of adolescents/young adults who attended some special preparatory kind of institution for kids but whose history had almost completely been lost...
And yet, I've never heard librarians question whether they should be retaining borrower records. If I don't trust the government not to abuse those records, why would I trust some other group of civil servants? Why do librarians still need to know I borrowed a book more than, say, a few days after I return it? If they need analytics, why can't they anonymise the borrower ID?
> It is the responsibility of library staff to destroy information in confidential or privacy protected records in order to protect from unauthorized disclosure. Information that should be regularly purged or shredded includes personally identifiable information on library resource use, material circulation history, and security / surveillance tapes and logs.
> Because of space limits, the Chicago Public Library, one of the largest library systems in the country, long has purged unnecessary circulation records each day and expunges Internet caches every 30 minutes, said spokeswoman Margot Holland. ...
> For years, Skokie's library has purged records on borrowed materials once they're returned. Recently, it installed software to delete records of Internet use. ...
> Sarah Meisels, Wheaton's library director, noted that Wheaton for years has purged circulation records as soon as they are no longer needed, making it practically impossible to comply with the Patriot Act.
> In part because the Patriot Act is so rarely invoked, and also because libraries historically have gone to lengths to preserve patrons' privacy, allowing for the act is almost a moot point, Meisels said.
You say you've "never heard librarians question whether they should be retaining borrower records." How much have you listened to libraries talk about their retention policies to know if they have been saying anything?
Bear in mind also that in the US something like 48 of the states have special privacy laws for library records.
Seriously, I am married to a librarian. Since it's a service sector job (and often a government one at that), they tend to be in uproar in private.
That they are in public is good policy in this regard; lest they lose patronage as confidence in the confidentiality of their patrons knowledge exploration is diminished.
Just an FYI but the Japanese take their privacy far more serious than many in the west are used to
Examples:
Check Japanese Facebook accounts. 99% of them have no pictures of themselves nor is their profile pic a picture of themselves
Japanese don't use selfie sticks to take pictures to brag. They use them to not have to ask a stranger to take their picture. See paragraph above
In Japanese law it is illegal to take pictures of people in public without their permission. Not enforced for crowds but it is the law
Trade shows booths will often have "no pictures" signs which are respected in Japan and would be ignored I most western countries
Nearly all hotels in Japan have porn but you can pay for it by using a cash based vending machine in the hallway. It gives you a card with a code you type into the tv. It therefore doesn't show up on your credit card or hotel receipt
You have always been able to buy almost anything on the Internet with cash in Japan. You order and choose to pay with one of the many 3rd party payment systems. You're given a code. You go to the nearest convenience store and use a machine there to print out a barcode page (or print it yourself). You hand it to the clerk who scans it and takes your money. The item is now paid for. The merchant knows what you ordered but the payment company has no info on you.
Japan was the only country to get in a tizzy over google street view issues.
I bring all those up just to point out that the Japanese have a vastly different attitude toward privacy
I can assure you this is an issue librarians feel very strongly about. I've worked at a number of libraries and all of them would only retain borrowing records if the patron requested it.
They were one of the first in the post-9/11 US to denounce government agencies getting data of library users, I remember the FBI first denying it, now after all we know about government surveillance is small potatoes.
Once the book is returned isn't it enough to record it in aggregate and remove the record from the personal file? Maybe they should change the way they keep records. Or is that a police thing from way back that requires them to keep a record of all the books you have borrowed. In which case I'm one step ahead as I spent my highschool in the library and almost never checked anything out. They will never find out all the terrible fantasy and sci-fi novels I read.
> Once the book is returned isn't it enough to record it in aggregate and remove the record from the personal file? Maybe they should change the way they keep records.
These records are ~50 years old, pre the computerization of library borrowing records.
It's a fair bet record keeping has changed in the intervening decades.
The scholarly value of these records is obvious, but I don't see much of a public interest angle behind publishing them. Is the Kobe Shimbun hoping its readers will wonder whether or not this famous writer had some controversial or salacious reading habits? Why not get his permission and at least try to get an interview putting them into some context?
Is it? Just because someone checked out a book doesn't mean they read the book. And just because they read a book doesn't mean they liked it, remembered it, or were influenced by it.
This information has no context. I see no value in them whatsoever.
I feel there's some political agenda to this uproar. Librarians and/or librarian organization in Japan are have reasons for concerns as there are some movements in munincipalities delegating operation of their public libraries to commercial enterprises. This is causing bit of concerns for expecations of privacy for patron's checkout record.
Company called Culture Convenience Club, operator of large book/media chain Tsutaya, now operates some public libraries in Japan, which basically runs both a library and a book store in the premise; and patron can optionally associate their store card with library card, so each checkout from libraries would count toward their in-store point, I guess in return for the record they will keep about that checkout. (There have been some questionable book selection/discard policies some take as conflict of interest, but that's another story...)
So I feel, at least partially, they are using this as opportunity to increase public awareness of their position.
Library books used to have a little pocket stuck to the back cover, with a lined card inside. If you wanted to borrow a book, you would take out the card, put your name on the next line, and give it to the librarian. When you gave the book back, the card was put back into the pocket.
The system was to keep track of who had borrowed a book, so that they could be tracked down if it was not returned.
I remember it being really fun in grade school, to realize I had checked out the same book as an older friend.
"In early 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director. Knowing nothing of the area, he borrowed a New Mexico guide book. On the checkout card, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, all of whom had mysteriously disappeared. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was America's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb."
I always enjoyed seeing the names of people who had read a book before me at the university library, and seeing how long it had sat on the shelf between readers. It was like joining a secret club that spanned generations.
The population density is also much less if we scaled the population of my apartment up to 13,000 km², but that isn't how metropolitan areas are traditionally measured. The NYC metro area includes three states, lots of sprawl - so it is much less dense.
I remember the local village library books only had dates on the borrowing slips.
My library card was a 5x5cm card sleeve. If I borrowed something, the return date was stamped in the book, and on the book's removable 5x15cm slip. That slip was put inside my card, and probably ordered by due date in the librarian's index file.
Given that Murakami is 66-years-old, I imagine that the school he went to used paper and pencil/ink to record transactions, and like most school libraries, failed to hire someone properly certified in data retention regulations who would have properly disposed of those records...I'm only being half-facetious here..I think you're wondering if there is some machination resulting from a mass surveillance policy at play here...it could be something much more innocent: papers that are just stashed away in a school's storage room:
> The cards were apparently leaked to the paper after a volunteer who once taught at the school came across them while he was sorting out old library books that were to be thrown away.
The reason why we don't hear about these kinds of data leakages is because paper usually gets thrown away. Or a building burns down/floods. And also, paper records don't come up in a Google search (which is the extent of "research" for many people today).
Why didn't the school back then have a policy of throwing away cards after x number of years? Probably for the same reason why anything was done before computers became so ubiquitous...we constantly underestimate how the power of computation and networking changes the accessibility of information. Back when I graduated from college (and by this time, Google was a major player), no one really complained about printing people's names (i.e. mostly students) in the police blotter. Now, I believe it is a rarity for a school newspaper that publishes online to also publish full names of the suspects, even though no federal/state laws have been passed that would require such discretion. The reason why this practice is now rare is pretty common-sensical to us today, but not so much when Google was still relatively new.
Why would anybody want this information destroyed. Protected until the person is long dead sure, but destroyed? A lot can be learned by seeing what experiences someone has had. Would you not want to read what Plato had read? How about Jefferson or Tesla?
While I tend to agree with you, your position implies we possess an inherent right to that information. Do we inherently have the right to review all your private information, even after death?
I spoke nothing of the rights of the dead. I asked if we (the living) possessed the right to view the private information of the deceased by mere virtue of the fact they are deceased.
I doubt patrons ever agreed, even implicitly, that should they ever become famous their reading habits would become a matter of public record, and maybe given to the newspapers. These records were never meant to be preserved in perpetuity for scholars and historians to pick through, so of course they aren't. Should the stores where Haruki Murakami shopped also save all of his receipts so we can know his dietary habits as well?
However, would they had been agreed to that some future historian century after their lifetime would spend their career studying their reading lists, if they once turned out important enough? Or that this data would be used to research what kind of books people read, for some obscure cultural history research project?
Heck, many people keep personal diaries, and most surely would object to people reading them without their permission while they are alive. On the other hand, their diaries are prime sources on given person's life to biographers, which is one reason some people keep them.
I understand literature and history departments at universities love this kind of sources.
In the documentary "Black Power Mixtape" Kweli mentions that he's called in to chat with the FBI because he listened to Stokely Carmichael speeches:
"Carmichael’s words continue to resonate 40 years later, says Kweli, who was stopped in an airport after 9/11, by “the FBI, the CIA, and the TSA,” because the government knew that he had been listening to Carmichael’s speeches. What these agencies and other authorities who remain fearful of black power miss, says Kweli, is that Carmichael, a “fiery speaker, “was “just a regular dude.” Exhibit A, for Kweli, is the interview with Mabel Carmichael, where the son respects his mother’s strength and dignity."
Because there's a huge amount of paper you might want to keep. And storing paper costs a lot of money.
It takes up a lot of space, and has to be kept dry within a reasonable temperature range. Academic libraries spend tidy sums on climate control to keep their books from rotting away. It also has to be indexed and filed so it's possible to find what you're looking for.
If you do it properly, you end up with something like this:
So the costs are non-trivial. And most people would consider library loan records trivial information. So there are good economic and practical reasons for throwing them out.
Besides, it's unlikely Plato, Jefferson, or Tesla did most of their reading in libraries. (Karl Marx did, but he was probably an exception.)
I'm not sure how I feel on this. On one hand, privacy is important, but on the other hand, if someone stumbled upon a reading record of teenage Goethe or Twain, no scholar would say "It's their privacy! We shouldn't look at them!"
Does that hold up in the modern sense of internet browsing history? If someone stumbles across my browsing history, they cannot publish it while I am living, but can once I am dead?
Sounds like Haruki Murakami should have installed uBlock Origin and that the library shouldn't have enforced a real names policy :)
Your browser doesn't have a professional code of ethics that prohibits sharing that information (although maybe it should). Librarians do, and they take it very seriously. That's why they're upset.
Totally understand why they're upset. My comment was more directed toward wondering what being dead has to do with something like a library checkout history being private or not as the parent suggested. It would seem that librarians would desire to keep such details private regardless of the person's status of living or dead.
