Confidentiality of browsing records

[JOSEPH MAXIMILLIAN MURPHY]

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or an officer of the law. Most of my legal
knowledge is drawn from watching _Barney Miller_ reruns, frankly. And of
course, this is all based on general US law and may not apply in some 
jurisdictions. But that's never stopped me before...

It seems to me that a police officer can look at the history file on a Web
browser _while interviewing the individual at that browser_ with no particular
problem. This seems as reasonable to me as checking what books a library patron
has on her desk at the moment, or shining a light in the backseat of a car
during a traffic stop. I'd call that a general "what are you up to"
observation. If the officer actually has to restart the browser, or go into the
cache after the user leaves, these start to sound a lot more like a "real
search" to me. My (very vague) understanding is that the police have the right
to use anything in plain sight, but have limits on how much extra effort they
can go to.

As far as the general public, I can go into the reading area right now and
check what a bunch of people have on their desks. I see patrons commenting to
each other all the time on what books they're checking out or returning. You
get an idea of what somebody's working on when you bump into them in the
stacks. So I guess some of this comes down to whether you define browsing
history as a public fact or a confidential record.

I suppose a lot of this can go into the "unless you use it, why are you keeping
it" school of system statistics, in my opinion.

-Joe Murphy            "Sometimes you just have to look reality in the face
murphyj at cua.edu         and deny it."
                           -- Garrison Keillor