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I read a discussion forum today about an author's struggle with privacy. We're not talking, "Hey I want to hide from my fans" but more of "Why are you showing up on my doorstep and how do you know where I live?".

For years we write. We query.We get rejected, defeated, and heartbroken because we haven't found an agent or publisher. We keep our eyes on the prize though. A gorgeous, solid, hardback book with a stunning, artistic cover and our name written in bold letters. Finally an author's Holy Grail has been achieved.

But now what? Hopefully, you'll sell the book, gather a few fans here and there. During this euphoric time in your life, the googling will start. People that love your work want to know more about YOU. So they search and with an overload of cyber information at their disposal, it should be easy to find out everything from your favorite meal to where your children go to school.

It's a scary, scary thought. Hell, it's scary even if your not famous. Stalking occurs for a variety of reasons and not just to famous people.

It's important to be savy now, before you get 'The Call' and before you're on the NYTimes bestseller list.

Some of the suggestions were:

*Have your personal information removed from spokeo.com
*Use a PO Box or have all fan mail come through your publisher
*Have an unlisted phone number
*Have multiple phone numbers. One for personal use and one you can give out and change easily if you need to.
*Have multiple e-mail addresss. One for personal relationships, another for fans, journalists, etc
*Don't post information or pictures of your children on the web
*Use a Facebook Fan Page rather than a personal page
*Have all your Facebook setting set to friends and family only
*Don't link to your family on Facebook and review your privacy settings or turn some information off like the city you live in
*Have home security
*When asked where you live for book jackets, press release, etc. give a vague geographic location or state like MidWest, Texas, New England

With all the info out there, it's important to protect our privacy and loved ones now and not wait until our name appears on a book cover.

In the last week, two blog posts that I've commented on have found themselves in The Guardian. One was Lucy Coats' trenchant post on ABBA about A Certain Person and his unpleasant brain injury comment. The other was independent bookseller Vanessa Robertson's equally trenchant piece about World Book Night. I’m interested in what happened to them and the appended comments and in what this means for all of us.

After Vanessa's WBN post, I'd left a comment, among many comments from other people, and mine was picked up by a journalist and quoted (well, half of it) in her subsequent Guardian piece. No other comment was quoted by name. In the Guardian, my quote was prefaced by the statement, "Author Nicola Morgan was among those happy to air objections..." This implied that I'd been asked by the journalist. Actually, she had tried to contact me but my phone was off while I was doing school talks and by the time I got her message it was too late: her deadline had passed. One might think that because I’d commented, I was de facto “happy”. Well, yes: I was happy to comment amongst all the other commenters but the small but important difference now was that my comment had appeared on another forum, in print, with another headline, and taken out of its original discussion. It had been, in effect, re-contextualised by someone else. I am not annoyed, because I utterly stand by what I said, and the journalist's piece was good. But it got me thinking.

In Lucy's post, one commenter's remark was also taken and used in the Guardian piece on that subject, and later, on ABBA, that commenter expressed a similar surprise to mine. I’m not criticising journalists, by the way. There may be an issue of asking permission but I’m not interested in that just now. Ditto any copyright issues to do with quoting from blogs.

So what am I saying? I am saying that the internet has changed something about conversation. Blogs, unless actually private and hidden, are public, and when we comment, although it might feel like a discussion where we're all in the room, we are putting our views out there in a very public way. We cannot then control where our comments will appear. And it's permanent. The internet doesn’t forget. The internet has blurred the once clear divide between the spoken word and the printed word. It's more permanent than either and possibly more powerful.

In a good old offline conversation, you know who is there, who is listening - unless you are being bugged - and you know it is unlikely your words will find themselves discussed in public elsewhere. You can make mistakes, change your mind, clarify what you mean if someone doesn't understand. No one can take your words out of context because all those in the discussion know the context. The discussion is also moderated by those in it. It is controlled and yet can be wild and free ranging. There is little at stake other than the opinions of those present.

In an online conversation, the new conversation, all that is different. There is much more at stake, much more that can go wrong, much less control. You don't know who's listening and you don't know what will happen to your words, except for one thing: they will remain.

We also need to realise that Facebook and Twitter conversations are now watched by journalists. You make comments on Facebook and those comments can be quoted or passed on to people outside your FB circle. I have heard of people having to "defriend" others because they are worried that those people, not being actual friends, may use their comments against them. And I worry about the unguarded comments that some people make on Facebook, because FB sometimes feels like a party, with a

I’ve been reading with interest the news stories lately about Epsilon. For those of you who don’t know Epsilon is a company that does marketing. Many companies give Epsilon customer lists and Epsilon uses that information to, say, email you about the latest Hilton Honors promotions. Except that there was a data breach and Epsilon lost up to 250 million email addresses

The reason I care about this at all is two reasons. One, there is a useful analog with libraries and how they handle their email lists of patrons. Obviously patron data is private and comes under whatever privacy laws a state has and whatever policies the library has. But is a library allowed to market to patrons? Or give these lists to peopl to market on the library’s behalf? This was the concern when the public library in Dixon California emailed patrons to let them know about ongoing library renovation plans and asked them to consider making donations. People who are not pleased with the library renovations, the Dixon Carnegie Library Preservation Society, is arguing that the librarian acted improperly when they gave patron email addresses to a consulting company without patron consent. Now let me just state I pretty well side with the library on this one, but it’s sure to be an increasingly contentious topic as libraries have more and more diffrent kinds of patron data to keep private.

And the second reson is just a cautionary tale. Many people with iphones are aware by now that the phone tracks where you go. I mean it has to in order to be a phone, but it stores this data in unencrypted form on both the phone and the synced compueter, forever. This means that anyone with access to a simple open source tool such as this one can make lovely maps like the one above. Good to know, and good to understand. As libraries move more towards mobile applications and mobile awareness generally, understanding how this sort of data works will be an important part of making sure we know how, when and why to keep it private.

Jon Mills is a professor and dean emeritus in the Fredric G. Levin College of Law. Among his many roles, he served as former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and as the founding director of UF’s internationally recognized Center for Governmental Responsibility. He is author of many books, including his latest, Privacy: The Lost Right.

When you find yourself on a dark street in a dangerous area of your city, you probably keep a wary eye out for trouble. Conversely, when you sit in front of your computer screen with a cup of coffee in your home or office, you probably feel completely safe and secure. But wait. We are learning that cyberspace, like any community, has its own mean streets and they aren’t always clearly marked.

Cyberspace — whatever that is — has its own predators, spies, abusers and liars. Like the real world, the online world includes bad people and shady deals. We have recently learned that our government was probably illegally spying on many of us, despite its enormous power to spy on us legally. But as long as you trust the government at all levels, you should have no worries. And, what about all the information we gladly place on the internet about ourselves.

Let’s start with the government. Spying is a well-established function of government and has been for thousands of years. Sometimes it involves finding terrorists or criminals — we like it when that happens. But, there are other times when governmental power has been abused at the expense of its citizens. Remember Richard Nixon’s enemies lists that targeted journalists? How about McCarthyism when professors, actors and others were spied on and politically persecuted? We don’t like it when government bullies its citizens.

It’s interesting to note that government is much better equipped to spy today and has been given more authority to do it under policies such as the PATRIOT Act. Over the past eight or so years, under the very real threat of terrorism, Congress has authorized unprecedented intrusions into the privacy of American citizens, including warrantless searches, secret courts and immunity to companies that provide our confidential information to the government.

Technology has made privacy intrusions much easier to accomplish and more difficult to detect. The lists that required so much time to develop in the Nixon and McCarthy eras are now compiled by a good search engine quickly and without notice. Who subscribes to socialist magazines? Who contributed to liberal causes? Who attends meetings of the ACLU? This information is instantly available. Today’s spies are software geeks, not guys in dark shades.

Beyond government spies, some of the greatest privacy violations are facilitated by voluntary disclosures. The recent controversy about Facebook’s treatment of information as theirs is important, but the information willingly shared with others has a substantial potential for damage as well. In a Facebook environment when an individual shares information, even with a limited group, what expectation of privacy is there really? What if that shared information is forwarded to others? Realistically, once information is shared on the Internet, it’s no longer private, like it or not. Your information, once you put it out there, may be forwarded to others who may not be as discreet with it as you would want. When a prospective employer slides a MySpace or Facebook picture across the desk to you, you may not have known it was available or that it had even been taken. In addition to shared information getting away from the user, many Facebook users don’t set their profiles to private, leaving them open to viewing by anyone, friend or foe. And, there are websites devoted to digging up information from social websites. Spokeo.com says it “will find every little thing your friend (or enemy, as the case may be) has said, done and posted on the internet. Nothing is secret…”. We are also subject to instant searches of all public information related to each of us. Zabasearch is committed to making that information available. Zaba CEO Nick Matzorkis says public information online is “a 21st century reality with or without ZabaSearch.” The amount of individual information publicly available is staggering.

We need to be aware of that reality and not think of cyberspace as a pure and wonderful new world. Because when we’re online, we’re wandering a neighborhood that has predators, spies, abusers and liars We need to keep our eyes open for trouble, even when we’re having coffee in our living room while surfing the net.

Are all our lives lived on the net, like some science fiction author’s view of the future?


How much is too much?

Reality shows vs good old fashioned privacy?

How much should we reveal about ourselves?

What is publicity and what is invasion?

How safe is it?

I will admit to being a complete novice but as much as I can appreciate the delights of social networking, it seems like a lot of fun, but I feel that there is an issue with privacy or the lack thereof.

I have had a website for quite a number of years and I am constantly thinking about how I can upgrade it or use it better to help publicise my books and myself to my readers or potential future readers. But can I have a public and a private face? I hope so.
Do I really want casual visitors who may have heard of me or my books, getting to know who my personal friends and family are. Finding out personal information about their lives and mine, and even my children’s lives? Suddenly the protective mother in me rears up at the thought.

The younger generation growing up with these sites seem to find no problem with sharing every little detail about their lives with not only their friends but also the friends of friends of friends. So if, as has been said, we are never more than 5 places removed from anyone on the planet, this means literally EVERYBODY!

Am I being paranoid or are they being naive?

We are often being told to be wary of giving away too much personal information because of identity theft, but surely these sites make people careless about what information they share and who they share it with.

There is the lonely person who just wants to be popular and agrees to be ‘friends’ with anyone who asks. There are the friends or lovers that have turned against each other, posting damaging material, under the guise of truth.

Okay, so I make up stories for a living but, hey, there are so many possibilities for horror stories in this alone and unfortunately you only have to listen to the news to see that not all of them are fiction.

There’s a quotation that I like that we bat around in activist circles a lot “Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” attributed to Margaret Mead. I like to apply this to some of my library struggles, saying that if I don’t point out things that I think are going wrong, who will? And that if I do make noise about things, maybe they will change. We’ve seen an example of this playing out over the past year with OCLCs new proposed policy and the pushback it received — starting small but gaining momentum — to the point where the general push of the old-new policy (OCLC retaining restrictive rights to records created by others) is off the table according to this post on LibraryThing. Good. Nice job team.

I have less of an opinion on OCLC entering the OPAC market because none of my libraries can afford them, still. I do believe that more sharing is a good thing, data monopolies are a bad thing, and murky policies that consolidate power anywhere other than “with the people” isn’t really solving a problem for libraries in general.

It’s time now for the library world to step back and consider what, if anything, they want to do about restricting library data in a fast-moving, digital world. Some, including some who’ve deplored OCLC’s process and the policy, want restrictions on how library data is distributed and used. Once monopoly and rapid, coerced adoption are off the table, that’s a debate worth having, and one with arguments on both sides.

            You go to the hospital, lets say the emergency room they have you laying on a narrow bed, your barely dressed and afraid to move; and people are coming in and out like it is the local supermarket. You have the right for privacy and you should demand it.

Image via Wikipedia

The worst is when they are not too sure why your have hives and a fever, they seem to bring in several medical students and now they are discussing your situation. WHY!

After they leave the curtained area, you ask the person with you, or the nurse why is it necessary that so many people have to come parading around you. If told that this is a teaching hospital, inform them that you don’t recall signing anything that said you could be put on display. You want to be diagnosed, cured and sent home!

            How about the pregnant woman, who goes into labor and constantly being checked on, by a different person every hour; or they look in through the little square glass window. Where is your right to privacy? The longer your labor the more faces you will see.

            So the next time you find yourself staying in a hospital, let them know how you feel; it is your right to have privacy. It does not matter if you’re in the Emergency Room, Recovery Room, or you have been admitted and people just wonder in and out. If after speaking the staff, ask for a supervisor; and voice how you feel.

            Some people are afraid to complain, but you should not; others will wait until they are home to complain, as not to be treated rudely during your stay. If it is your intention to file a complaint after you are discharged, make sure you take down names, along with the date and shift that they worked.

            Service is very important, and if your feel that your personal privacy was invaded; you have the right to let the Board of Directors and supervisor know!

The ten things I hate about our world the way it is today, often interact with each other.  There are:

              1)  Corrupt political systems

              2)  Corrupt Criminal Justice System

              3)  Corporate Corruption

              4)  Poverty

              5)  Pollution

              6)  Greed

              7)  Abuses of all kinds, people and animals

              8)  government waste and oppression

              9)  Political Correctness

Our political leaders are responsible for many ills of our world. They are the ones who are elected to oversee our welbeing, and ironically it is their own welbeing that they end up overseeing. The addiction to power, wealth and control, rots their common sense, and concern for those who look up to them. They get submerged into self concern and greed. They quickly forget the purpose of their authority as soon as they are given the freedom to rule.

Corporate big wigs work together with politicians in schemes that will reap them fortunes at the expense of those they are in charge of overseeing. All this self interest leads into a chain reaction of all the other things. Political power is what steers every facet of society.  Nothing can be done without government  being involved in some way.

There is no such thing as privacy or freedom anymore. The evils of governments the world over have managed to destroy the world, by allowing corporations to manipulate and pollute at will, for their own benefit. Our social security numbers are used to track our every move. We can not get utilities turned on without giving our social security numbers. We now can not even stay at a hotel, rent a car or make a phone call on a public phone without having a credit or bank card.

All these agencies and companies sell our personal information to each other, If we move to another State and get a new phone number, all these people phone us before we even unpack.  We are all being SPIED on, all the time.  Our personal information is spread across the computer for the world to find. If a hit man were looking for us, they would have no trouble finding us.

Everyone wants a credit or bank card instead of cash. That way they have access to your bank funds, and they legally commit fraud by taking out more then you allow them to, and they get away with it. The banks are in it with them. If you tell a store, or car rental etc. not to take out more than a certain amount for whatever, because you know that you will bounce checks and be in a mess if they do, they agree to not do it, then they do it anyway.

They invent charges that they did not tell you about, and simply get them out your account. When your checks begin to bounce and you, try to talk to the bank, they only say that “YOU gave the company your account number or bank card, and they have nothing to do with it.” The bank rips you off with high over drawn fees, and the people who demand the cards, take what they want and never get punished for it. We are cohurst into becoming victims, and we can’t do anything about it. But let us steal like that from them, and we go straight to prison for years.

Many employers are now getting in on this band wagon. They require direct deposit in order to pay you your wages. We do not have the freedom for ourselves, to decide if we want to pay cash to avoid all the rip off schemes that are being used, by way of credit and bank cards.

Landlords are also culprits of greed. They charge a non refundable fee to fill our an application to rent an apartment. If ten people fill out the application and they find reason to deny them, they keep all that free money for themselves. They charge between $20.00 to $50.00, and sometimes even more for this rip off game.

Landlords now require tenants to sign a lease that is usually for a year. This is holding the tenant HOSTAGE to the lease, so the landlord can be guaranteed rent money for a year, whether the tenants wants to stay there that long or not. If the tenant moves out they break the lease, and the landlord can garnish their pay check to get the rest of the rent money for the remainder of the lease. 

That is not enough greed on the part of the landlord. They also require a large deposit, and the first and last months rent, before the tenant can even move in. If you want your beloved pet to move in with you, they can refuse that you have a pet, or they charge you an outrageous deposit, and an added amount on your rent, to keep a pet. A poor person can not afford all these fees and rip offs.

Landlords have all sorts of loop holes to do as they please. They can make up things to evict you, and it’s your word against the landlords, and the courts always side for the landlord. Once you are evicted, you are placed on a black list so that other landlords can charge you higher rent for being on the list,and slumlords become like vultures who come to the rescue of those on the list, allowing them to move into their deplorable housing  as if you are a criminal, and they are giving you a break. Then they charge the same rents as the decent apartments go for.

Landlords keep your deposit, claiming all sorts of damages that were not your fault. The courts also side for landlords if you dare to take them to court to get your deposit back.  Judges don’t even want to hear witnesses or look at pictures that you may provide to defend your side. They don’t care. Landlords are Slave master to Tenant Slaves. Then they wonder why former tenants come back to break out windows and destroy the place.

Everyone is trying to ride the gravy train on the backs of those who are just trying to do their best to survive. Deceitfulness and greed has spread like a cancer everywhere. Poverty and homelessness has become epidemic. It has become a dog eat dog world, and the strong survive. The root of all evil has taken over with the “love” of money.

Poverty is the result of those who commit evil. Poverty is created because of GREED. Those who have financial security resent sharing with those who struggle to survive. There is no fairness or justice for the poor. Instead of seeking ways to repair the damage man has done on this earth, the wealthy in politics waste billions to fight useless wars, and explore space.  They do not even appreciate the beautiful earth we have right here. They want to go and find another planet that they can destroy, like they are doing to this one.  Those are the things I hate about this world.

As per usual I’ve returned from holiday travelling with a lot of cool links to share and the admission that I’m behind on my blog reading — and this is me who is never behind, this is all deeply distressing to me — and I bet you are too. Anyhow, some things I’ve enjoyed reading over the past few days. I’m putting a Computers in Libraries column to bed today and it’s talking about widgets. I like talking about widgets.

• Phone box becomes mini-library – small community in Somerset turns old phone box into a lending library/free box for books.
• Portsmouth (NH) public library is having a documentary showing of DIY Nation + artist get together this weekend which looks like fun and a nifty type of program to boot. Plus I sort of stupidly like that they can link right to the book in their catalog. It’s 2009, how many of us can do that yet?
• One line update/coda to the Des Moines photography situation from the DMPL marketing manager “At this month’s meeting, our board voted to remove the requirement that permission be granted for photos to be taken in our library.” Woo!
• Curious to know what’s going to happen at the Hayward (CA) libraries when they go to a Netflix model for lending [pay up front, then no overdue fees]. Looking forward to seeing the crunched numbers at the end of this.
• In another neat model, ArchivesNext reports on the Amsterdam City Archives’ “you ask we scan” approach to digitization. There are some linked slideshows and further data. Interesting model.

In my post-baby-sleepless-yet-attempting-to-work daze, I've been waiting for a story to move me to post again on Ypulse. I guess I should thank Mark Zuckerberg, and the audaciousness of his statement about "The Age of Privacy" being over for... Read the rest of this post

Two book-related things today that have me all in a dither:

1. Amazon hasn't put the MacMillan titles back yet. There's a book I need for class and I need it next week. None of the local library systems I use carry it. I can't get to an independent until this weekend, when we're supposed to get 17 inches feet of snow, so even if they ARE open, I won't be able to get there. I could get to Barnes and Noble tomorrow night, but they don't have it at the store, so I had to order it from their website. And pay shipping. (I have Amazon Prime. I don't pay for shipping.) Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

2. I live within walking distance of a branch of my local library. Given that I spend all day every day at a different library in a different system, I usually don't browse. I usually just look up books that my work-system doesn't own or has a long wait for, and put them on hold in my home-system. I went to pick up a book after work today (Yes, I went from one library to another. I am that nerdy.) Now, they have all the hold books on shelves near the check out desk so you can just go over and find yours and bring it up to the desk. I know this is a hot new trend in libraries right now but...

I will probably STOP using the Arlington libraries because of this. It is such a HUGE breach of reader's privacy and given that I pretty much ONLY use them for hold books and I just can't agree to this system... bad bad bad. Yes, they shelve the books spine down, so it's harder to see what the books are, but that just makes it easier to see who has a book on hold and it's not that hard to flip through and see who's requesting what.

Personally, I'm not very private in my reading habits (which you know, as I blog about EVERYTHING I read right here) but the principle of the thing has me very shaken up and upset and pissed off.

I'm more annoyed at the Amazon/MacMillan thing because they're private businesses and while they're both being stupid, well, it's business and they can do that.

The library, however, is breaking the ALA's Code of Ethics:

We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

So, I will be writing a letter to the director of the system and seriously rethinking my library use (Because, I do spend all day at another system, so I'm a bit privileged here, I know.)

But here's the thing-- just two years ago, Arlington libraries had a PR flap about this very thing. And, unlike the branch in the article, these books had no covering, the only concession made to privacy was the books being shelved spine down, which may have not had anything to do with privacy at all-- it makes finding your name (and your neighbor's) much easier...

A couple of days ago a news story broke about a suburban Philadelphia school spying on students in their homes using the webcams on school-issued laptops. The story has gotten a lot of play, rightly so, and it looks like the FBI is going to investigate.

There’s no doubt it’s creepy if school officials can spy on students without the students, or the parents, knowing about it. As I’ve been thinking about this story over the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about how so many adults that I talk to are worried about teen privacy. These conversations always focus on making sure teens know how to be safe and smart about their online privacy. But, what do we do when it is the adults who are supposed to be teaching teens privacy skills, that abuse a teen’s privacy?

There’s no doubt it’s creepy if school officials chose to spy on students without letting parents or the teens know about the decision. Yet, if the officials had let the parents know that this was going to happen, would it have been right, even then to go forward with the spying? I’m always talking with teachers and librarians about how we have to show respect for teenagers and that one sign of that respect is trust. What kind of trust can we build with teens if adults in their world find it OK to spy on them, perhaps in their most private moments?

There’s no doubt it’s creepy if school officials chose to spy on students. What if instead of turning on the cameras remotely, parents and school officials actually talked with the teens in the community about what’s going on in their adolescent lives? Is it really so hard to do that? Is it really so scary to have a conversation with a teen (or group of teens)?

Imagine if you were a teen in this PA community and learned that the school issued laptop was possibly being used as a device to secretly watch you. What would you think about the adults in the community? How would you feel about your privacy? Who would you feel comfortable trusting?

Of course, I do have to say, that we don’t know the full story, yet. But, doesn’t it give you pause that school personnel have the capability to spy remotely?

As you think, check-out these articles on the same story:

• Big Brother (or school) Is Watching You
• Students’-eye View of Webcam Spy Case