Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

I remain very fond of the signs a number of librarians put up, that say

"If you can read this sign, the FBI has not been here."
(and then a link or a bit more info about the Patriot Act)

Both our then library director and head of circ had one up at previous job.

There are also always complexities - that job had a computer which was only used to access the microfilm digital reader, and because of a series of necessary network things, it would create a profile if you logged in with your unique username and password.

(It wouldn't retain data: that got wiped when you logged off, but the profile folder with your username was technically findable if you were technically ept enough to do several steps and dig down into the user files. I took steps to hide them.)

I went back and forth with staff who were even more adamant about privacy than I am, (because I was in the 'Look, this is not a thing we can fix with the current computer setup for technical reasons that don't apply to our other machines, so it's the choice of having a privacy gap we don't like and solving it some other ways, or not having the machine' role.)

The machine in question could also do some really useful things (like scan to image files you could then drop into your network storage) but only if it had your network credentials.

The end result was a note that mentioned we were glad to log on people with a default password if they preferred (but they'd have to bring a large enough USB to move files or figure out another route) and someone would go into the machine and delete profiles regularly, but not necessarily weekly (because it took a while, because network issues.)