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News & ArtsWednesday, October 5, 2011
Politics / Tech / Books / Retail California's Reader Privacy Law
Posted by Anna Minard on Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:23 PM
Today Shelf Awareness linked to this article on the Reader Privacy Act of 2011, signed into law by California governor Jerry Brown this week. Already in place for libraries, this extension of the law "will require government agencies to obtain a court order before they access customer records from book stores or online retailers."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, who backed the bill along with the ACLU, Google, TechNet, and the Consumer Federation of California, said in a statement:
"Reading choices reveal intimate facts about our lives, from our political and religious beliefs to our health concerns. Digital books and book services can paint an even more detailed picture—including books browsed but not read, particular pages viewed, how long spent on each page, and any electronic notes made by the reader. Without strong privacy protections like the ones in the Reader Privacy Act, reading records can be too easily targeted by government scrutiny as well as exposed in legal proceedings like divorce cases and custody battles."
Good work, California. Get on it, everybody else.
(Related: Remember when American librarians went all badass about the USA Patriot Act? Librarians are so dreamy.)
1
Badass.
Too bad the FBI’s National Security Letters are backed by the Supremacy Clause and will skip past this law like it’s not even there.
Which is of course why now we need to lobby for a bill based off this one at the federal level.
Too bad the FBI’s National Security Letters are backed by the Supremacy Clause and will skip past this law like it’s not even there.
Which is of course why now we need to lobby for a bill based off this one at the federal level.
2
Librarian here! Not to include too much IRL detail and compromise precious SLOG anonymity or anything. But yes, we are badass. And dreamy. Thank you Dan.
3
@1 People have gotten too use to trying to fix symptoms, so that will probably not happen until after a bunch of other time wasting stuff is implemented.
There is a time for baby steps, this isn't it. We need to end the laws that infringe on privacy first, the rest is just details.
There is a time for baby steps, this isn't it. We need to end the laws that infringe on privacy first, the rest is just details.
5
Jerry Brown for president, 2016! I'm nostalgic for the days of his 1992 campaign. California Uber Alles!
6
They should do a law that ALL consumer records--internet records, medical, financial, telephone services, DMV records, housing, credit, etc. -- can only be obtained by court order. Go all in.
7
The best way to keep records private is to not have them in the first place. The library I worked for kept no records on what patrons had previously checked out, only what was currently out.
8
Dubious benefits of living in a small town, part deux: my local library still uses checkout cards you write your name on, in spite of receiving tens of thousands of dollars from the feds (via the state library) to finish gawddamn library automation already, and falsely claiming to the media, the county grand grand jury, and the feds (again via the state library) that the job is done. Unbelievably blatant. This is what you get away with in the sticks.
So browsing in the local library is not so much about finding books YOU want to read; it's more about thinking up "scandalous" titles to open the front cover of momentarily, and see who ELSE has read them.
This is what passes for entertainment in the sticks.
On the plus side, doing a federal investigation would be a bit tedious.
So browsing in the local library is not so much about finding books YOU want to read; it's more about thinking up "scandalous" titles to open the front cover of momentarily, and see who ELSE has read them.
This is what passes for entertainment in the sticks.
On the plus side, doing a federal investigation would be a bit tedious.
9
Another dreamy librarian checking in. Thanks Anna.
@8, I've worked with rural libraries. A couple of points:
1) Small town libraries are usually disastrously short on funding and hopelessly understaffed. Most are lucky if they have an actual librarian, or even a decent budget for books. In my experience, rural library staff are dedicated way beyond their pay grade. If you want it fixed, get involved. Volunteers can work magic in public libraries--so can a few citizens willing to campaign for more resources.
2) "Tens of thousands" of dollars is, unfortunately, not enough to institute library automation in traditional ways. Depending on a number of factors, that amount won't pay the extortionate license fees charged by library software vendors. Thankfully, there are now Free Software systems in competition, giving small libraries an outlet. But it takes resources and expertise to setup and maintain a catalog, even when the software costs nothing, returning us point one.
I don't know what's going on at your library or with the county grand jury, but when I hear rural library horror stories, I always wonder about the budget first.
@8, I've worked with rural libraries. A couple of points:
1) Small town libraries are usually disastrously short on funding and hopelessly understaffed. Most are lucky if they have an actual librarian, or even a decent budget for books. In my experience, rural library staff are dedicated way beyond their pay grade. If you want it fixed, get involved. Volunteers can work magic in public libraries--so can a few citizens willing to campaign for more resources.
2) "Tens of thousands" of dollars is, unfortunately, not enough to institute library automation in traditional ways. Depending on a number of factors, that amount won't pay the extortionate license fees charged by library software vendors. Thankfully, there are now Free Software systems in competition, giving small libraries an outlet. But it takes resources and expertise to setup and maintain a catalog, even when the software costs nothing, returning us point one.
I don't know what's going on at your library or with the county grand jury, but when I hear rural library horror stories, I always wonder about the budget first.
10
Librarians are dreamy. Especially the ones in the Men of the Stacks calendar that supports It Gets Better: http://menofthestacks.com/
Oh to be the portabella mushroom a January-December vegetarian sandwich.
Oh to be the portabella mushroom a January-December vegetarian sandwich.
11
@9, thanks for your thoughts. I'm involved up to my eyebrows, actually, and I agree with you that the branch librarians are wonderful, ridiculously underpaid, and stretched way too thin. The main problem is the head of the county library system, a Republican douchebag, and all the douchebag Republican supervisors who ignore her failures. Money is not an issue--we belong to a consortium of three counties, the other two much larger, who have long ago done all the hard work and pay the majority of the electronic-catalog and circ software fees. All we had to do was barcode the books and set up terminals and network access. The local Friends of the Library has tens of thousands in its coffers and has offered to do community fundraising county-wide for up to $100,000 more for staff or equipment, contingent on milestones and accountability. The director just wants the money dumped in her slush fund with no timelines and no accountability. We're in the process of telling her to get off the dime, or we're dividing the money among the local school libraries.
12
@9, re: the grand jury, a local resident who's a retired librarian and has previously automated TWO library systems in the San Francisco Bay area made an anonymous complaint to the grand jury after her repeated offers to do the job for our local library for FREE were rebuffed. The grand jury, consisting of a bunch of Republican bumpkins, asked the county librarian for her response, and then accepted at face value her assertion that the task was completed. All they had to do was walk into a branch library and check out a book to see that that was not true.
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