Netscape & Users Privacy

[Kathy Mcgreevy]

I wonder how divulging to authorities which websites a library user has
visited (even if he/she later sent harrassing e-mail or threatened one of
our campus computer systems) would be any different from divulging which
books a borrower had checked out (even if he/she then made a home-made
bomb and blew up a building.) If we've always said that borrower
records are confidential, how come a list of viewed sites isn't? 

Since I spend WAY too much time cleaning up after malicious
mischief on our public computers, part of me *loves* that we are able to
see where users have been when they cause problems; nonetheless, the idea
of looking to see what somebody was reading makes me pretty uncomfortable.
Where *do* we draw the line?

..................................................................
Kathy McGreevy                     kathy at floyd.santarosa.edu
Ref. Librarian, Electronic         kathy at sonic.net
  Network Services                 http://www.santarosa.edu/~kathy

Santa Rosa Junior College          voice: 1-707-527-4547
Santa Rosa, CA 95401               fax:   1-707-527-4545
..................................................................

On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, Pat Anderson wrote:

> Anna Trupiano said:
> >As to why Netscape does this?  Who knows???  As the sole user of
> >my home computers, the information kept in these files could be
> >handy.  As a parent, responsible for children, the information
> >might explain an observed behavior change.
> 
> I hate to bring this up, but there are times as a system
> administrator or lab administrator when the information
> can really be handy. Recently we had a awkward situation
> with a man who was looking at pornography on the web and
> masturbating in front of female patrons. When working
> with security to try to catch him, the police asked to
> see what he had been looking at on the web in order to
> help in developing a psych profile. So we did this, and
> went back and looked for the specific times and machines
> we knew he had used. I don't know how much help it was,
> and we do NOT routinely spy on our patrons this way. In
> this case I felt it was warranted. If you normally don't
> use this, and 99% of the patrons don't know about it,
> are you really putting their privacy at risk? We set
> the link tracking to two days, and keep the cache small,
> but patrons reset these and we don't worry about it.
> Patrons who are concerned about their privacy tend to
> empty the cache at the end of their session. Surely,
> under normal circumstances, this is sufficient?
> 
> Pat Anderson
> 
> 
>  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> P. F. (Pat) Anderson               "Learning, study, reading,
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> 
>