[sephoric]

It's an intellectual freedom that has no precedent throughout history. If you walked into a library in the 1950s and thumbed through a book about communism, you were probably put on a list. If you walked into a privately owned book store, the owners had a right to gossip and tell others what you purchased, and I'm sure many people unfortunately made use of that liberty. This isn't new.

[humanrebar]

You could go a few towns over and there wouldn't be any gossip because they wouldn't know who the hell you were.

[prepend]

There are many amazing new possibilities brought about because of the Internet. Just because Stalin (and the FBI) tracked your library habits doesn’t mean we should squash out useful functionality.