Week three: Security

This week I will be looking at the article The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal assistants by Rozita Dara. The question posed for this week is “discuss the security issues raised in this article, current and/or future, for a library.”

In recent years, the world has seen technology evolving to include the digital personal assistant. This technology has been made a useful tool in both home and professional spaces. From the perspective of the library industry, this is a tool that could be seen as being greatly convenient as well, with the potential to expand beyond basic commands such as environment control like lighting or heating and cooling, to helping patrons with detailed research questions and book recommendations with the use of artificial intelligence.

It can be easy to simply consider a tool like this as potential time saver, allowing for staff to do other work while the AI answers customer queries, but it should not be forgotten that this technology is not so different from any other computer a patron might access. Digital security should therefore be high on the priority list of any library looking into this kind of technology (San Nicolas-Rocca and Burkhard, 2019).

For artificial intelligence of this calibre to, for example, recommend a book title to a patron, it must first be given access to certain kinds of information in order to find a title to recommend. This information may only be as simple as that “romance novel”, but over time and with extra use, these personal assistants can create pictures of the patrons it is interacting with based on whatever information is fed to them. Furthermore, if the library is also giving the digital assistant access to the catalogue and perhaps even access to information attached to patron library cards, then it wouldn’t take much to link queries from patrons to borrowed items to private information.

Dara (2019) points out that the biggest issue with these kinds of digital assistants is that they are vulnerable to hacking or even malfunctioning, recording private conversations and sending them to complete strangers. In libraries in South Australia, often patron’s library cards contain home addresses and driver’s license numbers, which risk exposure if a digital assistant fails in protecting that information. Effectively, if libraries aren’t careful, this information could end up anywhere without the patron’s permission or even knowledge.

Considering this, libraries looking to invest in this kind of technology must strongly weigh up the risks with the rewards. They must ask themselves questions like, “will patrons have to sign a form allowing themselves to be recorded by the AI?” And, “should patron information be made accessible to the AI at all?” As well as, “how will the community feel about being constantly listened to by AI within the building at all times, even when they’re not interacting with it?” What it comes down to in the end, is that librarians have to consider what the patrons will be willing to potentially give up for the sake convenience.

References:

Dara, R. (2019). The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal assistants. Retrieved from http://owll.massey.ac.nz/referencing/apa-interactive.php

San Nicolas-Rocca, T., & Burkhard, R. J. (2019). Information Security in Libraries. Information Technology and Libraries, 38(2), 58-71. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i2.10973