Security News > 2024 > May > An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

Concerns about the privacy of library reading material date back to the early 20th century, explained Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and library-school instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to The Register.

Library privacy became national news in 2005 when George Christian, then executive director of Library Connection, a Connecticut library consortium, received a National Security Letter from the FBI. The Feds, under the US Patriot Act, demanded library patron information without a warrant and imposed a lifetime gag order that forbade disclosure of the NSL. Christian and three colleagues, who became known as the Connecticut Four, refused to comply and a district court eventually found the gag order unconstitutional, prompting the government to drop its demand.

The North Carolina School Library Media Association has objected to the law, which is being challenged in court, because it asks school libraries to violate the American Library Association Bill of Rights.

In December, 2023, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Masooda Bashir led a study titled "Patron Privacy Protections in Public Libraries" that was published in The Library Quarterly.

The Register worked with Zach Edwards, a security researcher, to analyze the network traffic in these apps and on the San Francisco Public Library website.

"In regards to the ad trackers, we ran several digital marketing campaigns over the past year or so featuring Library services with an outside vendor, and they gave us a tracking pixel for our site that allowed us to measure ROI," Wong explained.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/18/mystery_of_the_targeted_mobile_ads/