Privacy and librariesLIS 644

Dorothea Salo

Privacy vs. security• A security problem can violate privacy, sure.• But the violation is inadvertent! And often

involves some illegality!• We’re not talking about that today; we’ve

done so already.• We’re talking about perfectly legal (usually)

uses of information that still (potentially or actually) violate privacy.

• This is a minefield. I don’t have all the answers. We MUST still ask the questions.

What is privacy, really?• “Exposure of personal information” is too

easy an answer.• Exposure of what to whom, exactly?• danah boyd: “respecting context”

• Consider your social circles. You have several of them. What happens to them online?• So privacy is partly the ability to practice “selective

disclosure” (another boyd-ism).

• Privacy is also trust that those we interact with will not betray us.• What’s betrayal in a library context, and how do libraries

avoid it?

Why do we care?• Privacy of information use is a cornerstone of

intellectual freedom.• ALA Code of Ethics:

• III. We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

• Additional concerns include:• Privacy of research subjects in collected data• Privacy of living individuals mentioned in archival materials• Privacy of confidential business records• Privacy for especially vulnerable individuals

What is “freedom to read?”• Historically: preventing Big Brother from

watching patrons’ checkout histories• Remember the Patriot Act? How ‘bout that NSA?• What happens to circ records nowadays? How did

moving circ records digital help privacy?

• Today: is Big Brother the only threat?• Who else wants information, and will pay and/or bug

to get it?

• Historically: censorship and book banning• Today: is that all that keeps good

information out of the hands of patrons?

Do we have privacy laws?• Not in the US. Not really.

• We have libel and slander laws, and laws about children’s information online (remember those?). Limited “invasion of physical space” laws.

• Consumer-privacy laws have been introduced in Congress. No joy... yet.

• We often have laws/ordinances around library patron information.• And even in the absence of law we SHOULD (and

usually do) have policy.• KNOW THE LAW AND POLICY where you are.

• It’s different in Canada and Europe.• Canada has even taken Facebook to the cleaners once

or twice.

Why do privacy problems happen?• Monetary benefit• Accident or ineptitude (see thedailywtf.com)• Privilege and associated thoughtlessness

• Google Buzz: testing with its own (white, male, healthy, wealthy, educated) engineers and no one else.

• Collapse of realspace social boundaries on the web• This is a service-design problem! Human beings manage just fine

in realspace. Our online tools don’t give us the affordances we need to replicate that success online.

• Web is more than the sum of its parts.• Most scarily: DESIRE TO OFFER GOOD SERVICE,

e.g. recommender engines.

Libraries and privacy• It’s not as simple as “always protect

patron privacy!”• What about libraries and social media? Will we wipe

librarians off the Web? Really?• What about user studies for service improvement?• What about patron communities that form around

our materials and services?• What about users who WANT to share what they

read, watch, and listen to? Will we shake our paternalistic fingers at them and tell them no?

• What about digitization projects? Research?

• “How” is getting harder to figure out too.

Known privacy issues

Law hinders privacy research

• DMCA!• If there’s information about you on a machine you

own (or even one you don’t), and the only way you can find out about it is to hack the machine...

• These lawsuits have happened.• Often they go away very quickly as the vocal tech

community shames the plaintiff.• But Ed Felten of Princeton has been in and out of

court so many times...

Public records• Back in the day, if you wanted a public

record, you went to a physical building, combed through file cabinets, and paid for the privilege.• This is a variant on security-by-obscurity.

• Now many public records are online. Easy discovery and easy access make them A LOT MORE PUBLIC.

• How should we, as citizens, respond?• As records managers/archivists/librarians, how should

we educate, train, and refer?

An example

An example

Email• So how ‘bout that Petraeus guy?

• Email is only very loosely legally protected at present.• Larger point: we have the privacy protections we do

because they are enshrined in law, not because they’re societal norms. They’re pretty clearly not.

• Email is sent in the clear unless you take encryption precautions.• Even then it may be readable if your inbox is hacked.

• Your employer owns its email systems and email sent on them. Behave accordingly.

• Students: using non-university email may bypass FERPA protections.

What is “reidentification” or “de-anonymization”?

• Imagine this scenario:• One website has your name, age, zipcode, and gender.• Another has your age, gender, zipcode, pseudonym, and

dubious or sensitive taste in entertainment.

• If the info from both sites can be collated, you can be pegged to your taste. • And your pseudonym just got exposed. Hope you

weren’t using it anywhere else...• We aren’t as unique as we think!

• “Anonymizing” data doesn’t fix this.• We can be identified by our attributes, friends, and

behavior almost as easily as by regular identifiers.

• What price public records NOW?

Reidentification horror scenarios• Health information

• Wouldn’t your insurance company like to know...?• Becoming a major issue in health research!

• “Character witnessing”• Are you an atheist? A gamer (this came up in a 2012

political campaign)? GLBTQ and not out? A person of color who’s passing? A woman in IT? A whistleblower?

• A target for harm• Physical, legal, financial, employment, mental/emotional

(bullying)

• Where could library-patron information figure in to this? Archives informants?

Commercial privacy violation on the web

What information does the web collect about us?

• “Personal information”• Including health information, demography.

• Financial information• Information about our habits

• Purchasing habits• Entertainment habits (including, yes, reading habits)• Search habits

• Information about our physical location• through IP addresses or through web services like

Foursquare

• Information about our social lives• And then it correlates as much of this as it can!

How is this information collected?• Through server and search logs (IP addresses)• Through sign-ins

• some of which are “real name required”

• Geolocation of our gadgetry• Browser “fingerprinting”

• Which version, with what add-ons, on which OS... unique!

• Human error (and exploitation thereof )• Through observation of our behavior on individual

websites and across websites• Cookies, Flash cookies, “web bugs.” Worst case: “keyloggers.”

• Our online associates’ behavior• Which we obviously don’t control!

• How much of this are we actually aware of? How much do sites disclose? Let us control?

Effects

• ... on citizenship• ... on open discourse• ... on vulnerable populations• ... on markets

• is privacy-endangerment a winner-take-all market?• what about online redlining?

Examples

Privacy and ebooks

• Ebook vendors, unlike libraries, do not necessarily purge records of what you read.• You are entirely at their mercy as far as who they share those

records with and what they do with them.• Are they collecting info from library patrons too? Unclear!

• Because of this and DRM, they can also take away what you want to read.

• And then there’s what you search for, or look at, but don’t read.

• What do we do about this? What should we do?

Facebook has sold...• Your phone number• Information about your purchases• Information about your social network• Information about Facebook campaigns you’ve

participated in• Information about what you’ve “liked.”

• While refusing to let you opt out of the sale of this information.

• Your likeness, for advertisers to use on your friends.

• Google ain’t much better, and is getting worse.

Others have tried to use Facebook to...

• Screen employees• including by requiring applicants to hand over Facebook

passwords!• (To Facebook’s credit, it actually fought this one.)

• Perform background checks (for employment or other reasons)

• Do social-science research, sans informed consent• At Harvard, some researchers made their RAs hand over their

Facebook passwords so they could see friendslocked material.

• How are you feeling about your Facebook?

Guess what?• Facebook has sold MY information too, and

I refuse to use Facebook!• Look up “shadow profiles” sometime.

• If you delete your account, Facebook keeps and continues to sell your information.

• Facebook may or may not actually delete photos when you delete them.

• Guess why I don’t use Facebook?• Should libraries? Conflict between privacy ethics and

“go where the patrons are.”

“Like” buttons• When you log into Facebook, Facebook knows

you visited any page with a “Like” button on it, even if you do not click Like.• Facebook has also been caught tracking this on logged-out

users. They claim they’ve stopped.

• If your library puts Like buttons on catalog pages... (you do the math)

• Not just a Facebook issue, by the way.• Social-media truism:

• “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” —blue_beetle on MetaFilter

Amazon

• OverDrive signs a deal with Amazon to lend Kindle ebooks through libraries.• To do this, patrons have to tell Amazon their Kindle

identifier, just as though they were buying the book.

• Amazon sends “hi, your loan is ending, how about buying the book?” messages to patrons.• And is, as far as anybody knows, keeping information

about who checked out what.

Try it yourself: JSTOR• JSTOR “Register and Read” program

• Give non-affiliated scholars/interested public unpaid access to JSTOR, in return for a signup that ties reading to the signup’s email address.

• Let’s look at their privacy policy.• http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/privacy.jsp• What info are they collecting? Reidentification risk?• What risks might there be to program participants with

respect to what they read?• What do they say they can do with it?• How is this different from standard library policies,

practices, and legal protections?

Try it yourself: JSTOR

• Real reason to worry: Swartz case.• Is loss of privacy an unintended side effect

of library disintermediation/disruption?• If so, what do we do? Without sounding like

a bunch of luddite worrywart Trithemiuses just out to protect our own jobs?

Privacy in archives

• Boston College IRA case• Oral histories collected from Northern Irish people

who fought for IRA• Archivists promised informants not to release until

after those informants died.• UK authorities: “Fork it over, archivists.”• Lawsuits flew!

• What would you do?• You need to decide this. Before something similar

happens to you.

What now?

What people want• Control of which pieces of data they share. • Choice about how their data will be used. • Commitment that their personal data (i.e.,

email address, phone number) won't be passed on to third parties.  

• Compensation: Consumers also want a reason to share data, and to understand how they will benefit.

• (via http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/161410/consumers-willing-to-share-data-but-at-a-price.html)

• Can we do this in libraries? How?

More suggestions• Don’t collect data you don’t need.

• And throw away data once it’s no longer of use.• This includes computer logs! (IM chat ref, anyone?)

• Think outside your own demographic box.• As Google seems to have so much trouble doing...

• Be transparent.• Be activist. We have a bully pulpit!• PAY ATTENTION to the security and privacy of

library IT infrastructure.• This EMPHATICALLY includes the ramifications of third-

party IT such as “like” buttons.• It also includes contracts with content providers. A privacy

review should be an intrinsic part of collection development.

Rule of thumb?

• In the absence of a warrant or subpoena, don’t keep or disclose information about the behavior of identifiable patrons until the patron has not only consented, but ASKED YOU to retain or disclose the information.

• AND MAYBE NOT EVEN THEN.• We know people make poor choices here!

Protecting digital privacy

• My suggestions: encryption, deletion, awareness.• Encryption is where it’s at, folks. It’s not perfect, but

it’s the best we’ve got.• Delete digital records. As often as possible. Perhaps

oftener. (Sorry, records managers and digital archivists! Privacy comes first!)

• Try to be aware of when your data are being collected. Websites like tosdr.org (and the associated browser plugins) help!

Example: cloud storage• Cloud storage services almost all encrypt

data at some point.• Google Drive, not so much. Just so you know.

• Important questions: who holds the key, and when are the data locked up?• Dropbox, Box (for now): They hold the key. This means

they can rat you out, snoop, etc. Also means that data travel in the clear, and are vulnerable to packet-sniffing! NOT SECURE.

• SpiderOak: YOU hold the key, and encryption happens on YOUR machine, before data move over the network. SpiderOak doesn’t even see your data unencrypted, can’t decrypt it. Secure, but don’t lose passwords!

Example: protecting your web surfing from marketers

• Remember the stuff I discussed last week with respect to browser security? It can help protect your privacy as well.• On an untrusted network, use a VPN to prevent packet-sniffing.• Do not let your browser accept third-party cookies.• Use adblocking, tracking-blocking browser add-ins liberally.• Grab the “HTTPS Everywhere” browser add-in from the EFF.• Turn on the “Do Not Track” setting in your browser; it doesn’t do

much, but it does something at least.

• Serious question: which of these should we install on patron computers?• Or is that too paternalistic, and patrons will be upset when

Facebook likes don’t work?• Can we at least raise awareness, e.g. with tosdr.org plugin?

Example: smartphones• I DON’T EVEN KNOW, folks.• Smartphone owners do not control their

phone’s privacy/security. Either Apple or their carrier (Android phones) does.

• Phones leak data all over the place!• Location data particularly, but all “metadata” is of

concern.

• I don’t see an answer except better law.• Carriers are constrained by current legal framework

to keep metadata indefinitely!

Bottom line:• Libraries and archives generally do privacy

right. We certainly care about it!• A lot of online businesses are doing privacy

very, very wrong.• Not to mention the feds!

• And a lot of regular people are in no position to navigate the hazards.

• So we have a serious problem on our hands!• And we owe it to civil society to continue to set a good

example.