RFID's - Book Tagging, etc.

[Markus Kuhn]

Kit Lane wrote:
> I can also see there being serious issues with every library book
> keeping a record of every borrower ever

Pretty much the same information (and much more!) that "they" can infer
from your library borrowing record is also present in the log traces
that you leave while browsing the web. I would worry about the latter
much more. Whereas all a public library could capture -- if it wanted --
is which book you had for when and how long, web servers can and will
store which page you looked at for how many seconds. Especially in the
case of reference and text books ("User J. Doe took three textbooks on
urology home last weekend"), borrowing statistics are comparatively
negligible sources of private information compared to URL traces and
keyword search term histories ("incontinence AND orgasm"). With many
orders of magnitude more reference information available online today,
going into a physical library for anything but fairly standard
literature has become an increasingly rare necessity in many fields. I
think, library databases and RFIDs in books are a comparatively minor
privacy worry.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>