Month: March 2020

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Zoom and Privacy at the Library

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!

The amount that you spent web conferencing has most likely increased exponentially in the last few weeks. Library workers working from home now rely on web conferencing software for daily operations, including meetings and check-ins with other colleagues. With this shift to web conferencing, though, comes a shift in the level of risk to patron privacy.

Most libraries rely on third party web conferencing software which, like any other third-party vendor, brings its own set of risks to patron privacy. However, when you fundamentally change library operations to embed a third-party application into almost all parts of core operations, the existing privacy risks of that application change dramatically. You also introduce new risks into the mix! It’s already hard to keep up with all the risks to patron privacy in normal operations, and a rapidly changing work landscape compounds matters.

Let’s take Zoom, for example. Many libraries and library vendors use Zoom as their primary web conferencing application before the COVID-19 outbreak. That number only increased as many workplaces went remote, with many workers relying on their institutional Zoom accounts for both professional and personal online meetings. Other workers took advantage of Zoom’s generous free plan. What was once a tool used for webinar presentations and professional organizational group meetings, Zoom has become a lifeline for many remote library workers to stay connected to the library world for the foreseeable future.

With the increased use of Zoom came increased scrutiny of the application from the increasing number of remote workers in several industries. Soon after the shift to remote work started in earnest across the US, news media started reporting on privacy and security concerns with Zoom. One of the earlier news reports described Zoom’s “attention tracking” function, where an administrator can keep track of meeting participants who clicked away from the Zoom window. This level of tracking by the meeting organizer does not reach the level of other tracking software used by businesses to monitor employee productivity, but this tracking can still encroach on employee privacy. “Zoombombing” – the act of gatecrashing a public Zoom meeting and bombarding it with inappropriate material or attacks – is also on the rise, compromising the security of business and other meetings held by users who are newer to the platform.

Zoom’s data privacy practices have received increased scrutiny in the last week with the mass movement to remote work. In the same article about “attention tracking”, the reporter also touched on Zoom’s privacy policy’s vague language around selling personal data. The privacy policy has since been updated to remove the first sentence which caused the most concern, but the vague last sentence in the paragraph remains – “So in our humble opinion, we don’t think most of our users would see us as selling their information, as that practice is commonly understood.” – which is still a privacy concern. In addition, Zoom’s iOS App was sending user information to Facebook, which again wasn’t made explicitly clear in the privacy policy. Zoom released a statement that they will change the app to no longer send this information, but Zoom’s overall privacy practices and policies remain unchanged as described in this Twitter thread.

Your library might be using Zoom for business meetings, or it might be using Zoom for library programs, such as delivering online programs (like storytime or classes) or research/reference services. In both cases, Zoom might be collecting and processing patron data for their business purposes, increasing the risk of a privacy breach. You can take some actions to mitigate the new risks to patron privacy from using Zoom:

  • Use Zoom’s end-to-end encrypted chat feature [Update – the E2EE feature turned out to be false advertising.]
  • Limit the amount of patron data disclosed in Zoom, including text chats
  • Do not record video, voice, or text chats that involve patron data, including services to patrons conducted over Zoom
  • Do not share files with patron data over Zoom’s filesharing feature
  • Review privacy and security settings on the administrator, organizer, and user levels
  • Follow best practihttps://lifehacker.com/how-to-prevent-jerks-from-ruining-your-zoom-meetings-1842453487ces to prevent Zoombombing, including enabling the waiting room feature, limiting screen-sharing and voice controls (muting participants by default when they join), and locking the session when all attendees have arrived.

Limiting patron data disclosure on third-party applications is a challenge for a remote workforce. Choosing third-party applications with strong privacy and security practices is one of the best ways to mitigate privacy risks. Taking the time to assess privacy and security during a major global health crisis, nonetheless, doesn’t come naturally if you are not used to making critical privacy decisions under pressure. Settling into the new normal provides the opportunity to reassess data privacy and security practices in the workplace, including mitigating expanded or new risks to patron privacy. In the case of Zoom, limiting the amount of patron data transmitted through the application as well as making full use of privacy and security settings can help mitigate these privacy risks.

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Doxing: How to Protect Yourself and Patrons

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!

The Executive Assistant has her paws full this week with rescheduling and shifting various project timelines around thanks to recent events. She was batting objects off of ledges redoing Gantt charts when she came across a small list of privacy-related things to do on a rainy day and promptly knocked the list off the pile and onto the floor. While this is not a rainy day, a few of us could use a distraction, so what can be a better distraction than protecting your privacy?

Today we’ll explore doxing: what it is, how it can harm you and your patrons, and what you can do to protect yourself and patrons from being doxed.

Doxing and You

Doxing is the act of publishing private or otherwise identifying information about a person to the public. This can include your home address, phone number, private email address, or bank account details, but it can also involve publishing private information about those close to you, like family members, along with your private information. Most times doxing is used as a tactic to intimidate or to harm a person or their loved ones – an infamous example of doxing in action is Gamergate, where online harassers doxed several games journalists, researchers, and others in the gaming industry.

Being doxed can mean a stranger showing up at your home or otherwise harassing you as you try to go about your daily life, but it can also mean that your identity can be stolen. With just a few pieces of private personal information, you can social engineer your way through customer service staff and help desk representatives to get access to critical accounts, potentially destroying the financial and reputational aspects of a person’s life in the process.

How to Dox Yourself (@ the Library)

The scary part about doxing is that anyone with little time and effort you can get access to private information. The New York Times recently published a guide on how to dox yourself, describing the various places where you can find information that you thought was not available to the public. Search engines, social media, and data brokers are all potential sources for doxers looking for your private information. Take some time to study their resource guide and perform some searches on your favorite search engine. You might be (un)pleasantly surprised as to what you can find about yourself.

Libraries are not exempt from being potential targets for doxers to gain information about a person. Library patrons routinely contact library staff with requests or questions about their patron account or another person’s patron account. What can be in the patron record that can potentially be used to dox someone? Legal name, home address, and birth date are three pieces of patron data that come to mind. Chances are, though, that your patron record includes much more, including telephone numbers, email addresses, and even government or organization-issued identification numbers, such as driver’s license numbers or student or employee id numbers.

Library workers also face the possibility of being doxed and harassed. An article by American Libraries recounted the experiences of two library school professors who were doxed for their research on racial microaggressions in academic libraries. Library workers are subject to the same harassment and doxing that their patrons face in daily life, as documented in the article. Any private information of both patrons and library workers is fair game to a doxer, even at the library.

Dox Defenses

How can you protect yourself and others from doxing?
On the personal front:

On the library front, review policies and procedures surrounding patron data confidentiality, particularly surrounding requests to disclose patron information:

  • Do you have a procedure in place to verify the patron’s identity if they request access to information in their patron record? What are the procedures regarding identity verification in-person versus over the phone versus online?
  • What information is used in the verification process?
  • What information do you disclose in the patron record in person? Over the phone? Online?
  • What is the procedure when the patron doesn’t have this information for verification?
  • What is the procedure if the patron requests access to another patron’s record?

Employee information also needs protection; however, a different set of regulations, policies, and procedures apply. Check with your human resources staff as well as legal counsel to determine what information is private, what is public, and when employers are allowed to disclose employee information to others.

Doxing is scary and can lead to harassment and other dangerous situations. The best personal defense against doxing is to be proactive in limiting the amount of private information a random person off the street can access through a data broker, your online presence, or other places where private information can be accessed by someone with a little bit of time and resources. The best library defense is making sure that there are policies and procedures in place for verification of the patron’s identity before disclosing patron information in certain situations, as well as protecting the privacy of library worker information, be it from not publishing private information such as home addresses to protecting the data from unauthorized access.

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COVID-19 Updates And More Privacy Considerations

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat, everyone.

It’s been a week for many of us as COVID-19 rapidly changed both work and personal lives. During the last newsletter, public events were still going on, schools and libraries were still open, and we were not in a pandemic. This newsletter is being composed in a completely different world in Seattle – closed schools and libraries, canceled events, and the realization that COVID-19 is much more widespread than previously thought.

This week, many libraries are closed to the public, while other libraries that are still open are being pressured to close to protect the health of their staff. This means staff might be working from home for the first time, or are trying to move in-person library instruction online. The Library Freedom Project provides a good list of privacy considerations for online instruction. Academic and school libraries should also be aware of the updated guide on FERPA and COVID-19 and how student privacy is impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the general world, healthcare professionals, as well as employers, are struggling to find a balance between personal privacy and disclosure in the context of HIPAA regulations.

The rapid developments of last week also presented a challenge – how do you protect privacy while at the same time keeping up with changes at work? Many work from home arrangements were hastily put together with less than 24 hours’ notice, leaving IT departments scrambling to figure out if VPN or other remote access to staff systems can handle the increased user traffic, but at the same time might not realize that the remote access method has a vulnerability, such as an unknown open port, or even providing access to internal applications without special logins or IP restrictions. IT staff should ensure that only staff can access work systems and network drives, including requiring VPN use to access these places as well as additional authentication and user access rules. In short, IT staff have their work cut out for them in the next few weeks. Nonetheless, there have been many guides published in the last week, like this one from NC Department of Information Technology, for people working from home and what they can do to protect their digital privacy and security.

On the public services side, online communications between staff might take a variety of forms, from an increased number of emails to online web conferencing. If the organization doesn’t offer an online group collaboration platform, like Microsoft Teams, staff might take to free third party applications, such as Slack, Discord, or your tried and true suite of Google products. Patron privacy might be compromised if patron data is shared on unsecured applications, as well as places that are subject to a public records disclosure request. Therefore, it’s a good time to remind everyone to keep patron privacy in mind in working from home, including limiting storing and communicating patron data to secure communication channels controlled by the organization.

It’s impossible to keep track of every COVID-19 development, and libraries have struggled to respond to these changes. With more libraries closing and trying to keep staff busy, we cannot forget that the choices we make during the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-lasting consequences on data privacy for some time to come. It’s hard to step back and take a breath to reassess where everything stands on patron privacy, but it’s worth the effort to take a few moments to go through the library’s response so far and ask how each response might put patron privacy at risk.

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COVID-19: Resources and Privacy Considerations

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!

Some of you might already know that LDH is based out of Seattle. Seattle has been in the news with the recent COVID-19 cases and deaths in the area. We at LDH are staying relatively healthy (outside of it being allergy season in town). Nonetheless, some of you have also been impacted by COVID-19, including institutional travel restrictions, dusting off the disaster policy and procedures, and fielding questions from both staff and patrons about what will happen when there’s an outbreak of COVID-19 in your area.

There’s a lot of information out there regarding COVID-19 and what you should do to help slow the spread of the infection. Some sources include:

The most important things to keep in mind during this time:

  • WASH YOUR HANDS WITH SOAP AND WATER. It doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold water. There are several memes out there with lists of songs you can sing for about 20 seconds, be it Happy Birthday, the opening trumpet solo in Mahler’s 5th, or the chorus to this song.
    Hand sanitizer (store-bought, not homemade) is also an option, but not as effective as washing your hands with soap and water. [1]
  • Cover coughs and sneezes using your elbow or tissue (then throwing the tissue away).
  • If you are able, stay home if you are sick. This is not an option for those who do not have paid sick time, or if there’s a lack of coverage at work. If you do have the privilege to stay home, do so.
  • Extra cleaning of any hard surfaces as well as public or shared areas, such as open offices and break rooms.

COVID-19 has also brought up some good reminders and discussions surrounding privacy in a time of a possible pandemic:

Here are a few more articles surrounding the COVID-19 and the possible long-term implications to privacy regulations and public discourse:

Stay safe and healthy in the coming weeks!

[1] You would be surprised by the number of people who do not wash their hands regularly; this is something you should be doing anyway in normal circumstances. Hence, the shouting. Forever shouting about the washing of hands.

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That Little Driver’s License Card…

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!

A driver’s license card is the first document many people use to prove their identity, be it at work, or the bank, or the airport. The card has key information needed for organizations and institutions: name, date of birth, address, photo, and the illustrious driver’s license number. Driver’s license cards can be a convenient form of identification, but it can also be a convenient way for your patrons’ identities to be stolen if your library is not careful in its handling of the card’s information.

As part of the library card registration process, many public libraries require some form of identification with a current address to confirm the patron’s home address. These libraries almost always accept driver’s license cards as one form of identification. But what do libraries do with the information on the card? Some record the driver’s license number in the patron record, while others take a photocopy scan of the card (yes, this has happened!). Several libraries use specially programmed barcode scanners to automatically populate the fields in the patron record from the information provided from the driver’s license barcode.

Each method carries its level of risk to the library patron’s privacy. Storing driver’s license numbers in the patron record or other places can open the patron up to identify theft if the library’s systems or physical spaces are compromised. There are various ways to compromise a physical or electronic space. We are familiar with the story of a person breaking into the system to steal information, but sometimes it is a staff person who steals the information. We also can’t forget that a leak is as damaging as a breach – sometimes staff leave the patron record up on the screen at public service desks, or a report printout is left on a desk for anyone to see or take.

Overall, the best way to mitigate the risk of a breach or leak of driver’s license numbers is to not collect or store driver’s license numbers. In the collection stage of the patron data lifecycle, we decide what data to collect. The data you collect should be tied to a specific, demonstrated business need at the point of collection. If you are collecting driver’s license numbers as a way to verify patrons and addresses, what are the business needs for collecting and storing that number in the patron record? You can achieve the same business need by other means, including creating a process of validating the patron record information with the identification without recording additional personal information in the record. Another consideration is that while driver’s license cards are a convenient form of identification, the card might have a name that the patron no longer uses and might have other outdated or incorrect information, including address information if the state does not mail a new card when there is an address change. Finally, not all patrons have driver’s license cards, and your patron registration policies and procedures need to accommodate this reality.

Even if you don’t collect or store the driver’s license number, there are still ways in which the library might inadvertently collect more patron information than they need from the card. Scanning driver’s license barcodes to auto-populate patron registration forms and records can save time in data entry, but be aware that these barcodes carry much more information than what is presented on the card, including gender and even Social Security Numbers. The software that you use to scan the barcodes should only record the information needed for the patron form and not store the additional information in the barcode. Your software vendor should have information about how they treat this extra data; if they do not, then the vendor product is a potential security risk for the library and the patrons which needs to be addressed with the vendor.

No matter how your library handles driver’s license cards, your library should be actively reviewing privacy practices on a regular basis. In 2019, the Contra Costa County Library System decided to stop collecting driver’s license numbers and purged existing numbers from their patron records. This decision came just at the right moment – the library system suffered a ransomware attack at the beginning of 2020. While recent reports state that no personal data was compromised, the risk of identity theft to library patrons would have been much greater if the driver’s license numbers were still stored at the library. In short, it’s never too late to review policies and procedures around patron address verification at your library!