Privacy and Public Access Netscape PCs in the Library

[Thomas Dowling]

> 
> Or you could take voting booths, which already have curtains, and use
them.
> They certainly offer a public kind of privacy.
> 
 
Let me take this off on a tangent, since there seem to be a number of
solutions to throw at this particular problem.

Has anyone worked up any sort of script to wipe a browser's cache and/or
history file after a period of inactivity?  There are users, after all,
who aren't ogling the Playmate of the Month, but are instead using Deja
News to dig up articles on depression, or divorce, or coping when you've
just been diagnosed with AIDS...  Whatever, there are people whose privacy
needs go beyond not letting someone else see the screen; they may have a
justifiable desire to make sure the next person to sit down can't just hit
the back button a few times to see what they were reading.

(Quitting and restarting the browser does not do this.  Giving Netscape
3.0b2 a "URL" of about:global displays where I've been in about the last
week.)

Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu