[WEB4LIB] Re: customization is a double-edged sword

[Eric Lease Morgan]

Eric Hellman (eric at openly.com) wrote:

> It is technically quite easy to securely verify membership in a group
> while retaining a user's anonymity; it is much, much harder to secure
> the cooperation between interested parties which is required to make
> such a system work.
> 
> Of course you have to verify identities at some point. But while you
> can trace forward to determine that a user has been validated, the
> validation can be constructed in such a way that the reverse trace is
> computationally impossible.
>
> ...
>
> Eric Hellman
> Openly Informatics, Inc.
> http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure
> LinkBaton: Your Links that Learn     http://my.linkbaton.com/

After thinking about this a bit more, I concur with Eric H. and Thomas D.,
that retaining a bit of anonymity is technically quite possible. In fact,
the way the source code to MyLibrary at NCState is distributed, this is in fact
the case because it simply identifies you with an integer and there is no
reason why new users have to give their real names.

But to put a twist on the "double-edged sword" problem, what libraries want
to provide customized service to anonymous individuals? I am much more
likely to provide better service to a person I know and trust as opposed to
a person who is an alias. On the other hand, I suppose that is sort of the
point of libraries to begin with. Hmmm...

-- 
Eric "Debating With Myself" Morgan