[Steve Eisenberg]

"Patron information is sacrosanct here. It's nobody's business what you read," said Kari Hanson, director of the Bridgeview Public Library in suburban Chicago.

I liked the old system -- not really that old -- where you wrote your name in a card in the book. What was so terrible about my knowing that, say, the book I was reading had also been read, or at least taken out, by my town's mayor? Occasionally, biographers would use these cards to track down the supposed reading of those they wrote about. This "violation of privacy" did not let others know what we thought, just what we (started to) read. It still is the system in a lot of synogogue (and probably other small) libraries. What is so bad about that?

[Steve Eisenberg]

To expand on what I just wrote: Librarians never cared a fig about patron privacy until it became easier to keep information private than to let it hang out.