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It's happening. A new library opened here (a DC burb) and one of their bragging points is that one can log onto one of their computers by swiping one's library card! Sad, because librarians were in the front ranks of defending people's rights and privacy, but when some of the Neanderthals in Congress threatened to withhold their money, they folded like $2 suitcases.
I'm a librarian in the DC burbs, and I work on systems, and I'm aware of the login requirement for public-use PCs. Guess what? All the card swipe does is log you in. There is no transaction log that tells what searches you performed on which databases and which articles you found interesting enough to click on. Take it from me: We're not that sophisticated. We have a hard enough time telling which databases are getting used, and how much, without tracking what individual users are doing.
The purpose of the login is to catch people who: 1) use the PC to send threatening e-mails; and 2) use the PC to launch hacker attacks. Other than that, we don't know what they're doing with their logins, and we make it our business not to care.
Now, if some creep is under surveillance and is stupid enough to leave a browser up and running so that all the cop needs to do is sit in the still-warm chair and hit the "back" button, there ain't shit we can do about that. That's called "aggravated stupidity." We librarians in no way cooperate with such doings, and we're not even asked to, because a cop doesn't need library records to catch an idiot.
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