Comments on: File under: If it can be done it will be done

By: Moses Kleppinger

Moses Kleppinger — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:00:47 +0000

amazing and beautiful… thank you..

By: Harry Lewis

Harry Lewis — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:01:30 +0000

Nice!

By: Tyler Moore

Tyler Moore — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:12:47 +0000

Here is your reidentification opportunity: use Google Latitude (http://www.google.com/latitude) or Facebook Places to get real-time updates of your friends’ locations. Whenever you see a friend wander into Widener, correlate the time they leave with the timestamp in the feed. You could only reidentify your friends’ book-browsing habits, but given that Facebook Places is opt-out, then you can find the locations of many people who wouldn’t expect you to know it.

By: Jess

Jess — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:29:41 +0000

I can see this sort of feed as a minor input to privacy violation attempts, but given the fact that the library system’s various platforms (a quick google tells me that HOLLIS is still in use: is it still green-screens?) have access to all checkout info, maybe a determined attacker would just break the system security rather than correlating? Perhaps there are a few opportunities for social engineering at one of Harvard’s many libraries, once an attacker knows that a book that truly offends him/her has been borrowed? If the book is at all uncommon, perhaps this could be related to the “recall” functionality. It doesn’t seem it would be out of reach for anyone on library staff to get this info with no work at all. I doubt correlation is the weakest link here.