Alan Harnum

Library Voices - A Mashup of TPL's Live Search Feed with Voice Synthesis

31 Jul 2016

A recent fun hack project of mine is Library Voices, which streams the live search feed that powers Toronto Public Library's search dashboard to a random available speech synthesis voice from the Web Speech API.

When I posted the project on Facebook, a library friend of mine asked about potential privacy issues of library's the feed and whether I had any thoughts about that. I figured I'd post my response here more publicly:

I've got a few thoughts along those lines without knowing the specific details of any critique:

Maybe speaking rather cynically, but given the asymmetry between the information security capabilities of libraries and the information security (and legal coercion) capabilities of state actors who might be interested in library data, I would personally assume that any state agency (and some non-state orgs) with a desire for library patron data has the ability to access it, and conduct myself as a library user accordingly.

The reality is that most libraries (some specific ones such as Watertown, where Alison Macrina works/worked, may be an exception to this) do not have the capability to protect their patron data against determined actors, and are unable/unwilling to invest the resources to do so vs. other priorities.

The obvious disclaimer applies that I worked at TPL for nearly a decade, and the specific one that while I didn't write the code behind the search dashboard, I did work as part of the team that deployed it to the web. I wouldn't have done so if I considered it to have substantial privacy concerns.