The disturbing take-away from the article I posted is that someone’s private reading (or audiobook) history was being tracked and apparently trafficked by third parties, even on libraries’ own websites. Libraries are supposed to be more protective of patrons’ privacy and civil liberties, or so we all think.
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Hmmm… that’s why I frequent Gutenberg, Internet Achive and authors that sell their work directly to readers. Failing that, I buy paper and find a digital, non-DRM copy… by any means at my disposal. Same with music, except it is an easy task to rip vinyl, tape or CD. If I buy a copy of a creative work, I believe that no one has the right to prevent me from re-formatting it for my own use.
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I do not follow that line of thinking.
Libraries have traditionally defended First Amendment rights in those countries that don’t actually have First Amendment rights i.e. promoted your right to consume content, and opposed government attempts to ban content. So “civil liberties” in that sense. I don’t know about privacy specifically.
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I was thinking the old text based games where you type: “Turn right”, “Forward”, “Pick up stick”.
No graphics. (Forces you to read.)
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See (for U.S.): Library Bill of Rights - Wikipedia ; Library Bill of Rights | ALA ; Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights | ALA
It’s not an actual law, however.
Forty-eight U.S. states and the District of Columbia do have laws protecting library patrons’ records to some extent: State Privacy Laws Regarding Library Records | ALA
A concise historical timeline re U.S. libraries from the 1700s into the modern era, privacy stance, and government responses to perceived threats: Historical Overview – Data Privacy Project
So one might not think that one’s reading (or listening) would be subject to commercial exploitation (at least). If only that were true!
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You might want to have a look at Standard Ebooks
and the mobilread library
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=132
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I would like to see this kind of web site “virus” banned. Google (and others) have managed to get their tentacles into thousands of web sites, so that it is impossible to use those thousands of unrelated web sites without interacting with Surveillance Capitalism (or, conversely, if you PiHole too aggressively, the web site just stops working). The ban might as well start with government and quasi-government web sites, since that is on more solid legal and political and commercial ground.
Fun quote from the link in the OP:
Library privacy became national news in 2005 when George Christian, then executive director of Library Connection, a Connecticut library consortium, received a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI. The Feds, under the US Patriot Act, demanded library patron information without a warrant and imposed a lifetime gag order that forbade disclosure of the NSL.
Christian and three colleagues, who became known as the Connecticut Four, refused to comply and a district court eventually found the gag order unconstitutional, prompting the government to drop its demand. In 2007, the Patriot Act’s gag order provision was struck down in Doe v. Gonzales.
That by itself supports the contention that libraries do care about “patrons’ privacy and civil liberties” (in the US). Props to the Connecticut Four.
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Agreed. The number of sites that use Google Analytics is actually in the millions, I read somewhere recently. And probably increasing daily.
(Don’t get me started on the other usual suspects.)
It’s bad enough that healthcare services think it’s OK to poison their websites with that crap.
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I am pretty sure that Google Analytics is safe to PiHole though. I do and have done for years, without apparent ill-effect. The dangers are the ones that I don’t know about and the ones that I do know about but where blocking the domain causes malfunction. I would really like to block *google* but I am reasonably sure that such a broad block does cause malfunction (and, yes, I am aware that that could match domains that have nothing at all to do with Google but it’s a hypothetical anyway).
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You might wanna look into how uBlock Origin handles GA (and many others of these common trackers that are now plaguing the entire web): instead of blocking the GA script, it executes its own “dummy” and feeds the Octopus with irrelevant/unusable data - so that the Octopus be happy (but in fact can do nothing with this data…)
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Yes, it is. And/or use the available browser privacy extensions.
I would gladly do that, but too many websites force captcha/recaptcha on me.
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Yes. And that is the sad truth of where we have been led to by surveillance capitalism: it is now the norm that we MUST give our data to the powers that rule the internet. If we don’t allow this, resist and block their trackers, we are now considered “weirdos”, sociopaths or even deviants. That’s what the recaptcha is for, and it is our punishment.
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I don’t have a problem with that. In most cases it is well-motivated.
The problem is that the designer of any web site would use pieces that are dynamically accessed by the web browser from Surveillance Capitalist web sites and/or such pieces that are executed by the web browser. (Surveillance problems might still exist if the web site designer uses server side pieces that are Surveillance Capitalists but that would be relatively opaque to us, and probably less intrusive.)
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I prefer hCAPTCHA, or Arkoslabs or Cloudflare’s “Yes, I’m a human” solutions.
At least those - hopefully - don’t feed PII to Google.
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That Cloudlare solution does not work well when you block third party scripting.
I hate sites using captchas when they use third party captchas.
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Gone are the paper stickies on the inside front cover where I open the book and find “Old Aunt Emma” checked out “Pride and Prejudice” in 1947?
(Hat tip to Zazu Pitts for Aunt Emma.)
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Well, there is the involuntary unpaid labor aspect to those that are trying to improve their OCR and image recognition algorithms.
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Outstanding suggestions!
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Fortunately, there’s still the nuclear option for the worst abusers who haven’t succeeded in appointing themselves literal gatekeepers on the internet: A guide on how to completely block Fb and other companies
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