Evil Elf or Sneaky Bloglines?
I thought Library Elf was cool.
This popped up in my Bloglines today, and after reading there were over 200+ Elf records accessible, i did the search listed in the article.
LibraryLaw Blog: Breaking Discovery - Library Elf blasts a giant hole through privacy - and why I terminated my account
I was shocked that my elf account was one of the ones listed!
My email address was listed, along with links for other people to subscribe to my elf feed, and links that took you right to my current elf record, listing items out & holds.
Yes, I had added it to Bloglines. I had it marked as a "private" feed. As Bloglines states "private subs don't show up in blogrolls." I had no intention for y'all to be able to see what I have on hold or checked out.
I think this is a major problem that Bloglines still indexes the feeds we mark as private and I could not find this info anywhere on their website.
Jenny commented on the original post:
Count me educated now.
I admit, this is the first I've heard of the so called Bloglines set as "private" feeds being searchable. Why aren't private feeds protected from the spiders?
Wondering though--- are Hennepin Co's RSS patron account feeds searchable? The demos I saw at CODI used Bloglines, but they talked about how they didn't display the patron PIN and all the efforts they made to make it secure. Glenn P., care to comment?
This popped up in my Bloglines today, and after reading there were over 200+ Elf records accessible, i did the search listed in the article.
LibraryLaw Blog: Breaking Discovery - Library Elf blasts a giant hole through privacy - and why I terminated my account
I was shocked that my elf account was one of the ones listed!
My email address was listed, along with links for other people to subscribe to my elf feed, and links that took you right to my current elf record, listing items out & holds.
Yes, I had added it to Bloglines. I had it marked as a "private" feed. As Bloglines states "private subs don't show up in blogrolls." I had no intention for y'all to be able to see what I have on hold or checked out.
I think this is a major problem that Bloglines still indexes the feeds we mark as private and I could not find this info anywhere on their website.
Jenny commented on the original post:
I hope someone more technical than me will come along and leave a comment, but I'm pretty sure this is an issue with RSS, not Elf. It's an education issue that if you put any private feed in a public aggregator, anyone will be able to read that feed. The only patron feeds you should be able to read in Bloglines are the ones users have manually added, and the same would hold true for any feed coming from a library catalog or database.
Count me educated now.
I admit, this is the first I've heard of the so called Bloglines set as "private" feeds being searchable. Why aren't private feeds protected from the spiders?
Wondering though--- are Hennepin Co's RSS patron account feeds searchable? The demos I saw at CODI used Bloglines, but they talked about how they didn't display the patron PIN and all the efforts they made to make it secure. Glenn P., care to comment?
posted by digital.brarian at
7:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home