1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Plus I just plain old don’t believe it. I mean maybe it’s true for the narrowly sliced timeframe they’ve outlined but really? This isn’t a trend, it’s a blip. Want me to think otherwise? Release some actual numbers. Amazon makes more money off of ebooks than paper books. They’d like to keep doing that. So.

I’ve been meaning to link to this talk for a while, a transcribed talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the National Reading Summit in November. The title of his talk was How to Destroy the Book. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[T]he most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

• “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years” Note: this does not say “oh the internet is safe!” It just says that the internet getting more popular doesn’t correlate with sexual offenses against children. More from the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
• Speaking of Berkman people, I’ll be hanging out in the Boston area over the turkey weekend and likely going to this event that Saturday. Anyone in the area should consider going, it looks like fun.
• Evergreen is gaining traction as an ILS that works even for big/complicated systems. The Traverse Area just went live with their Evergreen implementation. Doesn’t that look nice? More about Michigan’s open source ILS project.
• I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.
• FCC broadband bill passed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.
• Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

During the panel, we were talking about things you’d want to keep private that you don’t necessarily need to keep secret. Sex and bathroom activities were two obvious examples. This then led to a discussion, more like hitting on a few points, about library records and how there is a difference between trashing them — so you can legitimately say “we don’t have any records to show you” — and obscuring them, say through encryption, so that the records are available to, say, patrons and yet not to librarians or, it follows, to law enforcement. I found this idea intriguing. Now that we’ve done a decent job making the point that patron library data is data that we protect, maybe we can make that protection more sophisticated so we don’t have to protect it by completely eradicating it. Maybe.

Anyhow, I got grabbed outside of the panel by Library Journal and I talked a little bit about this.

Also can I just say that Library Journal’s coverage of ALA was really engaging and worth reading this year? I haven’t been following ALA conferences in a while but I was surprised how much I enjoyed reading about this one in addition to attending it.

Do libraries still care if their information is being tracked, if they don’t should they?

NOLA ALA Council spurred this initiative. Soros funded.

Dan Roth – Wired senior writer

Privacy from a business perspective. “No one talks about their privacy policy” in business. Talked about a past disaster losing tapes with private info on it. Deep storage place said “that happens all the time”

“if you can’t get journalists excited about this how are you going to get people to write about it and get average people to care about their private information being lost”

People try to say “we’re more private than Google” way of brand differentiation. Ask.com and Microsoft.com

Ponemon, interviews Chief Privacy Officers & Marketers. CPO said we don’t share info, marketers said “oh sure we do”

Free Economy, companies embracing this as a business model “Arms race brewing” as companies who depend on free start competing, they serve up more private data about users.

Fortune tech coverage too

Beth Givens – Privacy Right Clearinghouse

Eleven years as a librarian. Privacy pie: info privacy (PRC, EPIC) vs. constitutional privacy (ACLU, EFF). Small staffing. They give people practical information about protecting personal information. Scott McNeely “You have no privacy get over it” [from Sun]

Informational self-determination is the way they describe it in Germany. Canada and Europe do a better job

Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right of access to your credit report – LEGALLY. Credit report is limited – LEGALLY.

Principles of Fair Info Practices [FIPS]
- access
- consent
- purpose specitification
- accuracy enforcement
- colleciton limitation
- security, accountability & uage limitation

“privacy policies are really disclosure policies”

Giving up is not the answer – suggests taking every opportunity we can to opt out. “Privacy basics and opt-out opportunities”

Identity Theft smartiepants – cares about consumers

Cory Doctorow – author/blogger, BoingBoing & etc.

dystopian novel – Transparent Society – we have to give up privacy but we are allowed to spy on our governments the way they can spy on us.

Architecture is politics, building networked societies and systems we wind up involving the systems that grow out of them.

Social networking – “I’m pretty upset about it in a lot of ways”

How can you say information is private but not secret? [obvious retorts: peeing, sex]

The more raw power you have the more power you have about the disclosure of your personal information.

outsourcing – we don’t even have the option to set policies on, for example, our RFID tags

Discusses regulation being the solution. You could make a brakeless car and it would be cheaper, but

Vendors are not treating libraries as first class citizens w/ its DRM and etc. Libraries have a moral obligation to do this for their patrons.

This is a business model that no one wants.

Undermines personal security and social security. In surveillance societies, no one trusts each other. There’s not enough social cohesion to form societies. We get surveillance instead of policing. “cameras are forensic, they only solve crimes after the fact”

Thinks it’s harder to find information as we collect more and more.

QUESTIONS
Kent Oliver Q What’s at stake overall?

Beth – we will lose it, just like minority report, worries abotu biometrics tracking us everywhere
Dan – what happens when our health records can be read by our employers
Cory – “personal information is like Uranium” a little bit is no big deal but combined in huge databases is toxic. “all this information we’ve created will be like smog, there will be no way to destroy it” “you’re loading the gun and handing it to all their successors forever.”

Minority Report & GATTACA mentioned

Q. Isn’t the horse out of the barn? How do we get back to before we gave away all this data?

Cory – pmog [justin hall's multiplayer game], sxip
Dan Roth – consumers have no idea why we should care
Beth – check out your own profiles and see what people know about you. Get the “right of access” into law.

Kate – How to be invisible, should we all try that?

Beth – you can’t really do that or you have to rely on other people
Cory – “I don’t think privacy should be a hair shirt” This is the American dream sybaritic. DEFAULTS MATTER esp in the free and open source world .talk to just ahndful of geeks and you can make enormous contributions across the world.
Dan – talking to HP chief privacy office talking about how they took care of privacy issues in the EU where it’s required but NOT in the US where it’s not necessary.

Kent – how do we make the average person care

Cory – Pablo “hackerbot” hacky idea about letting people know what can be known about them [prius example]
Beth – creative ways to educate and inform people “talking the talk and walking the walk” how do we get the message across creatively.

Kate Q. how do we balance users wanting details but us trying to protect privacy?
Cory – encryption

Librarian Q. how do we talk to or administration about this
Beth – data breach will be ugly and expensive to clean up
Cory – best way to avoid a data breach is to not have the data

Q. bought a house, 9/11, now I feel all my data is everywhere. tips how to leave less personal information?
Beth – create a living trust & put property in the name of the trust. “the younger you start, having a PO box and only a PO box…” “working with young people in so important”
Cory – 1. take control of your tech 2. taking control of your debate “this doesn’t make us safer” “if you want to keep people safe you have to keep them safe from the important threats” 3. regime change

Q. surveillance society “the bigger danger to me is more like social control”
Cory – safety and security are not platonically divided. does being safe from terrorists mean being less safe from governments?

Q. isnt there some sort of “cool factor” to sharing all this personal information?
Dan – talked about reading the family blog of a private squirrely CEO

Q. our inconvient truth, we need to be talking about information footprints the same way that people talk about carbin footprints
Dan – people will ignore you if it looks like you’re going to make things more difficult for them, people feel like giving away private information gets them something
there’s a third alternative between being a refusenik and giving in. taking control of the information they can gather from you.

I’m assuming they got some grant money for this, because I got a very slick looking concept paper about the idea with a lot of good backgrounder information (email me if you’d like me to send you a copy) and they ponied up money for a domain: PrivacyRevolution.org. Unfortunately, the domain has been parked at GoDaddy until pretty much today, so my blogging about it is going to be minimal since I’m getting on a plane in 12 hours and will have minimal net access until sometime Friday. There is a survey there that I encourage you to take.

You can also follow their twitter stream and they will be following the Librarian Society of the World Meebo chatroom. I’ve offered to pose some questions to the panelists from people who can’t be there [i.e. you, dear readers] though I’m a little worried this is late in the game for anyone heading to ALA. In any case, if there is a privacy-and-librarians topic that you are dying to ask a question about to these panelists, please put it in the comments here and I’ll be happy to do my best. Jenny Levine is the other guest blogger so stay tuned here and there for more information about this as it comes in.