San Francisco lawyer Christine Dudley has found that her choices of library books choices resulted in ads being served to her that were clearly driven by her reading choices.
In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library.
Her audiobook consumption, she explained, had been highly focused the previous month, focused on a specific subgenre that she doesn't believe would come up by chance.
"You don't coincidentally come across mobile ads [for that particular subgenre]," she told The Register. "Those ads made me extremely angry."
How likely do you think it is that the SF library's is running IT back office?
Even if the library has strict policies against sharing its users' reading habits, their IT provider might ignore user privacy issues.
Certainly, it smells a lot like General Motors' privacy debacle, where they sold customers driving habits to data brokers who in turn sold the data to insurance companies.
This is why government agencies should bring IT functions in house.
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