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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how I feel on this. On one hand, privacy is important, but on the other hand, if someone stumbled upon a reading record of teenage Goethe or Twain, no scholar would say "It's their privacy! We shouldn't look at them!"

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Differences being your examples are dead and someone stumbled across them. This is a car of a live author having his details leaked.

Does that hold up in the modern sense of internet browsing history? If someone stumbles across my browsing history, they cannot publish it while I am living, but can once I am dead?

Sounds like Haruki Murakami should have installed uBlock Origin and that the library shouldn't have enforced a real names policy :)

Your browser doesn't have a professional code of ethics that prohibits sharing that information (although maybe it should). Librarians do, and they take it very seriously. That's why they're upset.

Totally understand why they're upset. My comment was more directed toward wondering what being dead has to do with something like a library checkout history being private or not as the parent suggested. It would seem that librarians would desire to keep such details private regardless of the person's status of living or dead.

You don't understand why a dead person's privacy is less important than a live one's? Is that really the problem you're having right here?

Goethe and Twain are dead. Murakami is still alive.

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