Netscape & Users Privacy

[Rebecca Jackson]

I'd like to know what the difference is between this action and checking
(and letting people know) a person's circulation history.  

Rebecca Jackson
Gelman Library
The George Washington University
rjackson at gwis2.circ.gwu.edu

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
> 
> 
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>