Ann Arbor District Library, RSS feeds, and patron privacy

I just tried searching on "AADL" in Bloglines.  Although I got individuals' reading records, as far as I could tell, I couldn't get names, card numbers or other personally identifiable information. Just token numbers.  (Although a few records at the end of the list had names ..?)

Maybe I should move back to Ann Arbor (a great place). 

Or maybe someone more technical than I could rummage around, see if I'm correct, and if so, see whether the Elf and others could set up their feeds similarly... ? 

Comments

[Mary]

Thanks Eli - it looks like you've figured out a good solution.

[eli neiburger]

We also send out a story once a month to all our patron info RSS feeds that says that the feed may become public if they read it with an online rss reader, so that even the bloglines or yahoo users know what they're getting into.

[Edward Vielmetti]

A few have personal information (one of my earliest feeds is one of them). I'm pretty sure that the AADL stripped out all of the identifying marks soon after the RSS feeds went live since those old feeds with names in them date back to July 2005.

I looked through my own feed data and see nothing personally identifying in it. The token number is a one-way hash of the user login information, which you can't use to get back to a login name or to any other access.