Netscape & Users Privacy

[Pat Anderson]

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


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