Patron Privacy in the "2.0" Era: Avoiding the Faustian Bargain of Library 2.0

In today's information ecosystem, libraries are at a crossroads: several of the services traditionally provided within their walls are increasingly made available online, often by non- traditional sources, both commercial and amateur, thereby threatening the historical role of the library in collecting, filtering, and delivering information. For example, Web search engines provide easy access to millions of pages of information; online databases provide convenient gateways to news, images, videos, as well as scholarship; and large- scale book digitization projects appear poised to make roaming the stacks seem an antiquated notion. Further, the traditional authority and expertise enjoyed by librarians has been challenged by the emergence of automated information filtering and ranking systems, such as Google's algorithms and Amazon's recommendation system, as well as amateur, collaborative, and peer- produced knowledge projects, such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Delicious. Meanwhile, the professional, educational, and social spheres of our lives are increasingly intermingled through online social networking spaces such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, providing new interfaces for interacting with friends, collaborating with colleagues, and exchanging information. Libraries face a critical question in this new information environment: what roles might libraries play in providing access to information in today's digitally networked world?One strategy to address this has been to actively incorporate the increasingly interactive, collaborative, and user- centered features of the so- called "Web 2.0" world into traditional library services, thereby creating "Library 2.0" (Casey & Savastinuk, 2006; Courtney, 2007; Maness, 2006). Examples include providing patrons with the ability to evaluate and comment on particular items in a library's collection through discussion forums or comment threads; creating dynamic and personalized recommendation systems ("other patrons who checked out this book also borrowed these items"); using blogs, wikis, and related user- centered platforms to encourage communication and interaction among/between library staffand patrons; and interfacing various library collections and services with relevant Web 2.0 platforms, such as Delicious, GoodReads, and Facebook.Launching such Library 2.0 features, however, poses a unique dilemma in the realm of information ethics, particularly in relation to protecting patron privacy. Traditionally, the context of the library brings with it specific norms of information flow that protect patron privacy (American Library Association, 2012b; Foerstel, 1991; Gorman, 2000; Morgan, 2006). Library 2.0 threatens to disrupt these ethical norms, since the Web 2.0 world introduces competing norms that lean toward the open flow and sharing of personal information. Despite these concerns, many librarians recognize the need to pursue Library 2.0 initiatives as the best way to serve the changing needs of their patrons and to ensure the library's continued role in providing professionally guided access to knowledge. Longitudinal studies of library adoption of Web 2.0 technologies reveal a marked increase in the use of blogs, sharing plugins, and social media between 2008 and 2010 (Lietzau & Helgren, 2011; Lietzau, 2009). In this short amount of time, Library 2.0 has taken hold in hundreds of libraries, and the question before us is not whether libraries will move towards Library 2.0 services, but how they will do it, and, from an ethical perspective, whether they can maintain their professional norms and their long- standing concerns for patron privacy in the process.The late cultural critic Neil Postman (1990) warned:[A]nyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. …