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Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way?

This is the difference between having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not. The customer/business relationship is a poor substitute for the real thing, even when they try to foster the trappings of false "community."

there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying.

As it should be. There are institutions and cohorts of society trying to control access to information and opinion. This has been going on for quite some time. Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about it in the 80's.

Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies

A librarian friend of mine noted that libraries had come into the business of de-facto social work.

> having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not

A sense of civic duty?

These words sounds like they are from another period.

I think this is low in the mindshare of the population of many western countries. As a society we're mostly concerned with personal progress, social influence and monetisation.

And this is the essential problem with society today - the lack of acknowledgement that there is such a thing as civic duty, or the greater good. It's all about personal advancement regardless of the externalized costs.

In the words of Toby Keith - It's all about me, it's all about I, it's all about #1...

Also, the kids these days wear funny clothes, their music is too loud, and they have no manners. We’re really going to hell in a handbasket. Also the JavaScript frameworks have too many plugins.

Kids today?

"“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. " Margaret Thatcher, 1987

And this is why the West is in decline. Modern society is based on the specialization of its individuals to perform tasks more efficiently and that in doing so, society as a hole benefits from this.

Community died some time in the 1980s with the rise of "loads of money", and famous politicians stating "there's no such thing as society any more".

It used to be that people would make a living then give something back in later life - either public service such as becoming a politician or joining one of the many societies like the Rotary Club that performs philanthropic acts.

Now politics is a career, philanthropy is the preserve of the astonishingly wealthy and everyone cares about nothing but self, making a buck and what they can get.

We lost a huge amount in that process. I sincerely hope we see it rise again sometime soon.

People get shadowbanned on HN for using the the term that describes this phenomenon: neoliberalism. It’s exactly that: eroding of civil society while pushing the ideology that you can (and should) monetize everything. A sad development might I say.

>People get shadowbanned on HN for using the the term that describes this phenomenon: neoliberalism.

Nobody gets shadowbanned on HN for using the term neoliberalism[0].

I'm going to guess from the age of your account that you had a former account which was banned, and I would bet money that using the word "neoliberalism" was not the cause of it.

[0]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=neoliberalism

That's not really neoliberalism, moreover, nobody is getting banned for that word.

Neoliberalism is more of an academic, economic concept, it's not inherently anti-community, it just happens to be.

McDonald's and Starbucks don't want to wipe out civic cohesiveness etc., but it just might happen in some situations wherein everyone ends up working for 'large corps' instead of local businesses etc..

The opposite political ideology is called 'Communitarianism'. It does not have a current identifiable place in America politics.

The Christian Democrats (i.e. Angela Merkel in Germany) are of this philosophy, it's more of a culturally conservative kind of socialism, it puts families, communities, people and the wellbeing of said groups at the centre of political and economic objectives. It's done in a localist manner (in the same way the Catholic Church has given great local leeway to parishes etc.), i.e. local context matters more than top-down authorities etc..

Whether you buy into it or not, I suggest it's really sad that it's missing from the American dialogue because a lot of that is just what we need right now.

Inherently localist ideals have a hard fight against more globalist ones (neoliberalism, state socialism) for obvious reasons ... if there were more established Communitarian ideals, I'll bet Donald Trump would not be president right now.

Well, it is an economic school of thought, but you hugely under play the connection. Neoliberalism can't work without the abolition of community and promotion of personal responsibility. Community breaks down by disassembling any collectivist groups and giving them over to the market and the now powerless individual. Personal responsibility is often disenfranchisement - nearly all our freedoms came about through collective action and organised civil disobedience.

The personal freedom to buy your social housing (without building more), have a personal pension with individual charges (with no attempt to ensure "enough" pension or group benefits), the privatisation of community and state assets and on and on. The removal of community power by constraining the rights and budgets of local government, centralising ever more then privatising or closing in the search of market solutions and smaller government. At a higher level it enabled the rise of globalisation.

There was absolutely need to re-balance in the seventies and constrain the unions. Effectively abolishing them was perhaps too much seeing today's gig economy and zero hours contracts. Another example of personal responsibility! After thirty years neoliberalism appears to be a means to restore the pre-war gilded age inequalities whilst completely forgetting why the post-war consensus (social security, society and Bretton Woods) came about.

Hopefully Communitarianism will get its chance soon.

Not all unions are 'good' ... so abolishing bad unions was not 'neoliberalism' ... it was simply 'anti socialist' or getting rid of some of the bas parts of the system.

Government sector Unions for example need to be reformed.

And FYI 'personal responsibility' existed long, long before neoliberalism as an ideal.

Communitarianism fundamentally requires 'personal responsibility' as one cannot 'help the community' until one has 'one's own house in order' so to speak. It goes even further: Communitarianism implies that 'personal responsibility' actually includes responsibility towards the community.

My grandparent owned a large lumberyard and employed people fairly, and in their retirement, spent several days a week visiting retirement homes, playing music, entertaining, 'doing stuff' in the community etc.. That's communitarianism.

But yes - neoliberalism does require the 'breakdown of the community' in the classical sense. They would be happy if we were replaced with docile, human drones that work, consume, and don't have opinions.

Don't think for a moment all unions were good. A good selection were militant trouble makers thinking little of the good of their members. The miners in the UK came firmly in that category.

The Air Traffic union in the US seems, from this side of the Atlantic, much less clear cut. They seemed to be a middle class, white collar union. Reagan supported them during campaign, then after election crucified them.

Nonetheless both cases were the start of the neoliberal changes and the neutering of unions good, bad and indifferent.

I should have made myself clearer, I meant personal responsibility and choice as political catch phrase. It was the well worn 1980s selling point and justification of many of the changes and privatisations. Many of them in areas that were generally accepted as having a place in society, such as social housing etc. Which is not at all the same as real personal responsibility and civic duty.

My own parents did similar - neither of them talked about it much or felt any need to show anyone what good they were doing. They quietly did it as part of their beliefs, contributing to the community.

Examples requested.

It's highly unlikely you could have been banned for just talking of neoliberalism. HN does seem to have a hair trigger for shadow banning newer accounts, meaning you have to use the self-serve unban link or occasionally mail them.

If you are criticising neoliberalism, depending on the conversation and thread, it's distinctly possible you may be downvoted to oblivion. That's a different, and disappointing, thing. :)

For me, it’s everything I dream of and yearn for. I will work for it until the day i die whether you join me or not. We have built a trash pile and treat each accordingly. Libraries are little pieces of harmony. When they close, I will go with them.

I don't the general populous' stance on companies having their data comes from a lack of civic duty. I think it's much more of a slow boil situation.

Cell phones happened and Facebook happened and everyone was like "Hell yeah this is awesome!". Later on, it became clear that all these companies were offering services were slurping up all kinds of information about us that given the choice we probably would say no to.

But when the cost of gaining back that privacy is giving up all these conveniences we've come to base our lives around, it becomes a pretty tough sacrifice to make.

Library: A library is an asset to a community.

Company: A community is an asset to a company.

This is a very important point. Libraries do more than just lend books. They are institutions that preserve and promote knowledge and have certain values "built in". They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. Having cheap books available in Kindle store does not fully replace functionality of a library.

> They also often serve as local community centers of sorts.

The public libraries in Seattle are an amazing thing. My wife goes to "kids play time" with our ten month old son at a couple of different libraries every week. And we can also bring him in to the kids play area any time and take the kids area books on the honor system. It's a really great way to interact with other kids until we start using day care or he gets to preschool age. And it gives my wife a chance to meet other parents and get a break.

I used to go to Bellevue Library every single weekend because my wife used to work around there. Just being able to randomly fall upon an old book was great. The atmosphere, a sense of community, a nice park besides. A library is a lot more than a collection of books.

I'm so damn glad King county does a good job maintaining the community libraries.

The Capitol Hill branch of Seattle Public Libraries was the first Library I had been to in probably 20 years and I fell in love with the entire system. It made me read much more than I was in the past and the free events and learning they have are amazing. It is an enormous benefit to the citizens of the city, as well as the low income/poor who can charge their cell phones or use the internet so they can keep up with potential employers who may call them or send them emails, as well as look for jobs or complete online applications (as well as many more things).

They also provide a free subscription to Lynda with your library card.

Cool! Didn't know about Lynda.

You can also get free tickets to a lot of local museums: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/m...

If you haven't checked out the Living Computer Museum down in SoDo, it's an absolute MUST. SPL provides free tickets to it :)

They serve as community centers 100%. Storytelling nights, after-school clubs, classes, dances, voter registration and voting booths... I am sure I am only grazing the surface of how libraries operate as community centers.

Agreed - besides obviously checking out books, my kids (8 & 10) do a range of activities (all free to attend) at our local library - they’ve done a creative writing workshop, a science workshop, an arts & crafts session, attended a biodiversity talk and will shortly do a couple of sessions to make a stop motion animation - and that’s just in the past two months. They also often see class mates there, which adds to the social aspect of development outside of a school context.

A newspaper interviewed a local librarian. The interviewer pointed out a lot of people use the free wifi from the parking lot after hours, and asked if that was a problem.

"That's the whole point."

I've conducted many interviews from such parking lots. I would completely use the library more if they didn't block non-443 ports (though it's understandable that they do).

Not to mention that libraries have curated collections, which unlike the Kindle store are not filled with bot-generated scammer garbage: http://davidgaughran.com/2017/06/03/amazon-has-a-fake-book-p...

Yeah, the guy who wrote the original article(that this piece responds to) had obviously never set foot in a library, because he still thinks of them as repositories of books. That's a function but it's not the main function.

When I lived in a semi-rural area as a teenager the library was one of the few places me and my geeky friends could congregate for hours. They would let us reserve meeting rooms so we could play games together. If that library hadn't been there we would have had no third place.

> librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights.

Are you sure that's true? I mean, my local library (like most, I'm sure) has a fully digital checkout log which keeps a pretty decent amount of state for active records.

A pretty reasonable architecture, given the size (small) of the system, would simply keep this data around for as long as needed. Sure, they might not be particularly diligent about backups and preservation for stale/useless data. And no, they probably aren't exploiting it to sell you ads.

But I'd bet anything that they aren't deliberately purging old data. They probably have it all sitting around somewhere, because frankly that's the obvious implementation choice. Designing systems to affirmatively delete stuff (and not break in crazy ways) is actually fairly hard, and libraries aren't given to elaborate engineering.

I'm willing to bet that the quote you got from the librarian was aspirational: she doesn't keep data, she cares about privacy, and she hopes and expects that the people who wrote the backend do too. My intuition says otherwise.

The American Library Association specifically discourages the behavior of your local library:

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag...

> For example, if the LMS offers the ability to save the checkout history, this should be an opt-in feature not turned on as a default.

The policy also recommends libraries minimize collection of data in general, use HTTPS whenever possible, and maintain a warrant canary.

I just checked my own library login, and it looks like they keep 18 months of checkout history and then purge it (or at least it is no longer available to me after that point, which means it is no longer available to the librarian because we share the same interface).

Checkout records are going to vary from library to library depending on which software package they are using as their ILS (“integrated library system”) and how that software package is configured. My library for example (the one I work at, not my home library) has no way of knowing the checkout history of any given item except for 1) who has that item out now, if it is checked out and 2) who had it out last. In our case the database is hosted remotely by our software vendor, so we really couldn’t get at checkout data other than those two points above as that is all that displays in the staff side client, and we don’t have any servers with patron data onsite.

Privacy is such an ubiquitous concern for librarians that most ILS software offers automated, time-based purging. Set it up once and it just happens without any staff intervention.

n.b. My company creates and manages library software.

Yes, librarians deliberately destroy records to make sure they are not used: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/13/us-library-r...

But that's only for ILLs. CUNY's collections aren't that big to begin with ILLs are even fewer, especially in big cities with large public libraries like the NYPL, BKPL.

I worked at a much larger library system in the same city and I know for the fact that most do need to keep such transactions for years, at least for tracking and billing patrons for books lost or never returned. After another few years, they sell their overdues to (debt) collection agencies for a few pennies on the dollar.

Libraries are public institutions funded by tax payers and mainly employ civil servants and government employees. It would be terribly ironic if a public institution did not abide by the law or respect your rights. Not to mention they do not exist for profit.

This is probably not true at most libraries. I used to work at one of the largest library systems in the country and they had patrons' checkout logs for at least a full-decade (in a poorly designed, insecure database system, now outsourced to a managed provider at a great cost $1M+ per year). I also don't believe they had patrons' privacy or data security as their priority -- most libraries simply never had the kind of technical competence to protect such data.

This is just nostalgia at play. When you borrow a book your name goes on the slip with a timestamp. The slip is reused until its full and then its thrown away. If the slip never got full it would most likely never be replaced. Anyone who checked out the book could read the slip.

Policies haven't gotten much worse. The ease of data aggregation has simply gotten much better.

It wasn't that long ago that every library book had a card, and when you checked something out, your name, or a stamp/imprint of your library card number was placed on that card, when you checked the book back in, the card would be removed from a file, placed back in the book, and the book re-shelved- making it trivial to match to the person... now, you would have to look in each book and see who had checked it out, but still not very private.

I haven't been to a library in 30 years or so but it used to be that the list of people who borrowed the book were written in a piece of paper in the book itself.

So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last.

This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)

In my city, the libraries post signs that, immediately after you return a book and pay any late fees, they destroy all records that you ever checked any books out.

I think it's been longer that 30 years; the only thing I remember on the check-out slip was the due date.

Which was fascinating: "Wow, no one has checked this out in a decade!"

> Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying.

I think younger people are just in general more relaxed about privacy.

Total agreement. Libraries are a public good. Any disruption is going to be at least partial privatization. If it's going to remain free for the end user and not funded from public dollars, the public just became the product (to harp on that meme).

The more time goes on, the more I think we need to nationalize libraries beyond just the ones already owned by the federal government. In the digital age, the framework that is a local library makes less sense than there being a place to pull audiobooks/ebooks from an organization funded through the national endowment for the humanities.

Oh well, we live in a world where people willingly and happily give all their privacy to a private entity just for the privilege to take a cab. So the future is grim.

Never mind that there's an app that combines social media and...a payment service.

I would say using Venmo is different but the idea that a social network could be built around a p2p payment service works surprisingly better than it has any right to.

https://soundcloud.com/replyall/4-follow-the-money

It's the idea that P2P payments are PUBLIC BY DEFAULT on "social media" platform and what that says about people's idea of what privacy is.

I don't disagree but at the same time it's one setting away to make them all private forever. It could be much worse.

> Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying.

Wasn't that more or less part of the plot of either SE7EN or Along Came a Spider (or maybe some other late-90s procedural thriller)? tl;dr they tracked down the suspect because the NSA or FBI was secretly keeping records of library checkouts.

It was Se7en and I guess also Conspiracy Theory.

While I appreciate your idea, I think you should also see the other benefits people have from Netflix/Amazon like model.

Library's true customer is the reader and hence everything is designed to suite the reader. For Amazon the true customer (!) is the shareholder whose value needs to be maximised. That is why Amazon has astronomical market value where as libraries mostly depend on charity or taxpayer funding. There is a good reason why Amazon can offer you millions of products but a local library will have only thousands of books. There is a good reason why Netflix can afford to produce so much original content for your tastes but the libraries do not produce anything original. The factors you are citing are correlated.

There is no value judgement here, but I think we need to appreciate the good both kind of organisations are doing to the world and they are not comparable.