Last week, with little fanfare, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York did something very few private companies would ever do to protect its users’ privacy: it quietly began to purge its interlibrary loan records.

“This policy change is motivated by the idea that libraries should not keep more information about their users’ requests than necessary,” wrote Beth Posner, head of library resource sharing at the school.

“We will continue to keep all requests from 2013 forward until further notice; eventually we will only keep a rolling history of one year or less, though, in order to help ensure that ILL requests remain confidential,” she told students and faculty in the email. “Previously, you could find a list of everything you ever requested through ILL.”

Perhaps that sounds like harmless information, but Polly Thistlethwaite, chief librarian at the Graduate Center, said that guilt by association with controversial books has a long history and that librarians have a duty to protect readers of “heretical texts”.

“Most librarians would say that you are not what you read,” Thistlethwaite said. “You are not the material you look at.” But others have disagreed. “There’s also really bad police work,” she observed.

“I was approached years ago at a different library about users who’d checked out certain astrological books,” said Thistlethwaite. The NYPD officer told her he was looking for the Zodiac killer. “Most police investigations are a little smarter than that, but sometimes they’re just not.”

Recently, it’s become more common to try to force librarians to turn over user information and compel their silence simultaneously. Multiple librarians have pushed back against “national security letters” that would do just that in the name of public safety – a dangerous order to resist, since those letters include a gag order. But in 2005, when the FBI served a national security letter to Connecticut’s Library Connection demanding reading records and hard drives, the librarians resisted with such force that the government capitulated.

The American Library Association had their backs, resolving unanimously to “condemn the use of National Security Letters to demand any library records”.

As use of the law to acquire patron records since the Patriot Act has increased, librarians have become some of the US’s foremost experimenters in data security. Now they’re doing something even the most security-conscious private firm would never dream of (but have often been encouraged to do by security experts): purging sensitive information in order to protect their users.

Thistlethwaite said that there was “nothing burning that prompted” the loan record purge; it was simply best practice – and one that many in the government and in private industry have been loath to adopt.

Data retention is becoming a more pressing issue. When infidelity hookup site Ashley Madison was hacked last year, its archives revealed that even when the company had charged users to purge their information from its records, it hadn’t simply declined to honor that agreement, it had added the credit card numbers they supplied to pay for the purge. When the US Office of Personnel Management was hacked, its database was revealed to stretch back fully 30 years, including employees who had left government service or even died. Personal information is valuable, and when users surrender it, it tends to become currency for marketers and law enforcement.

Interlibrary loans, said Alison Macrina, founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, form an ad-hoc record of departures from regular patterns of lending – the kind of thing that often interests intelligence and law enforcement analysts.

“It seems like it’s a more interesting data trail,” said Macrina. “It’s a book you wanted so bad that you went to special lengths to get it, and we know how intelligence agencies pay attention to breaks in patterns.” Macrina hadn’t heard about the CUNY Graduate Center initiative, but said it was a relief to her. “It’s taken a little too long but I’m really glad to see it’s happening somewhere.”

Libraries continue to develop ways to keep patron privacy at the forefront of the services they provide, including material accessed through library computers. Macrina’s group encourages libraries to operate “exit nodes” that aid the operation of difficult-to-trace web browser Tor – the Department of Homeland Security attempted to enlist the help of local law enforcement to shut down the project at a New Hampshire library last year, but was thwarted.



At a local level, Macrina said, librarians generally understand that the town police and the town library are part of the same town. But when it comes to federal authority, few librarians have qualms about “having an adversarial relationship”.

“They’ve antagonized us so much,” Macrina said. “Ashcroft called us ‘hysterical’, and it’s a profession mostly of women, so, you know. That didn’t go over very well.”

Disclosure: the author’s wife studies at the CUNY Graduate Center