Library, Child Pornography, Personal Privacy, First Amendment Rights, Bacon? What?

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

I think if something's viewable on the screen in a public place, privacy isn't an issue. If it were a matter of them, without warrant, going in and looking at the history on the computer, that'd be one thing, but in general there is no way to turn a computer monitor at a library where it's not visible to someone else in the public space from some angle. He may have had it turned so that when he was talking to her, she couldn't see it, but the article doesn't seem to say that she had to do anything extraordinary beyond move to another angle to be able to see it.

By no means do I mean to imply a legal issue in a library worker looking at what patrons are doing. Just as a library policy issue. She didn't just happen to see what he was doing. She decided that he was "acting suspicious" and snooped into what he was doing. Regardless of how difficult the snooping was or wasn't, from a management policy perspective I'd get rid of that employee. Because if she had decided he was being suspicious and went around to look over his shoulder and it turned out he was just trying to keep others from seeing him read a page about premature ejaculation or coming out of the closet or just ideas for anniversary presents to his wife it would be an invasion. Yes, she found a crime (allegedly) and it should be reported. And she should lose her job. At least she can feel the warm glow of thinking good came out of the cost.

But then, when I worked at a public library we were on the far liberal side of interpreting the ALA guidelines for user privacy and rights of access (until electronic systems made it impossible to avoid, they didn't even have library cards and it was quite literally impossible to identify all the books checked out by an individual without manually reviewing EVERY book checked out of the library and even then no identification was required so anybody could lie). And when I was in library school I was a strong advocate of liberal application of the guidelines (which wasn't necessarily popular in a program dominated by school librarians). Fortunately, it didn't often come up in academic librarianship which was the area I actually worked in.