My thoughts and prayers go out to Ted Kennedy and his family today. From what I can tell reading the news reports, it doesn’t look like his situation is grave (other than his age and his cancer, that is… let’s say it’s not immediately grave), but his collapse yesterday is still cause for some alarm.

I don’t support Senator Kennedy’s politics, but I believe he generally tries to do what’s right for the country, and I appreciate his service.

Finished Darkness of the Light (by Peter David) last night. That’s two books in four days, for an average of two days per book. The way I figure it, since I started in the Read 100 challenge on the thirteenth, I need to average about 3.52 days per book, so I’m doing pretty well.

Darkness of the Light was pretty much typical Peter David. I’m not sure if it counts as Science Fiction or Fantasy; it seems to be about Earth many, many years after it was overrun by twelve races from an alternate dimension. However, since those races are mythological races from ancient tales (the Oculars are cyclopses(?), Trulls are Trolls, etc.), and the tone of the story is mostly fantasy (if one ignores the presence of cars). Either way, it was very good.

As one can always expect from PAD, the story has plenty of puns and jokes based on literal interpretations of various figures of speech. There are also plenty of interesting plot twists. Unfortunately, there are still two more books in the series (to my knowledge, these haven’t been published yet), and the book’s end feels very unfinished.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the story.

My next book is Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis.

From The Consumerist comes a story about Mint.com (a personal finance management service that aggregates one’s accounts) notifying their customers about fraud:

A couple days ago, we wrote about a fake company called Adele that was fraudulently charging 25 cents to credit cards. Personal finance site Mint heard about the scam too, and they reviewed their users’ records and notified them if they found a fraudulent charge.

At the end of the article, the author brings up the question of whether Mint’s searching through their customers’ records was a violation of privacy.

So far, there seem to be a few basic opinions that are repeated in the comments:

• It’s good that they did this, but it’s somewhat disturbing at the same time (which seems to be the opinion of the Consumerist’s original poster as well).
• What’s the big deal? Privacy only matters if you’re not doing anything wrong.
• No one actually went through the records, it was just a quick query.

The first opinion is actually the one I share. The fact that something like this is possible is one of the major reasons I opted not to use Mint when I looked at their service a while back. At the same time, I realize that Mint users don’t share my opinion on this. Their tolerance for this sort of intrusion is much higher than mine, or they wouldn’t be Mint users in the first place.

I don’t think Mint did anything wrong. In fact, I think that this is simply an additional bit of value added to the service for most of their users (because, again, by virtue of being Mint users, I assume that they aren’t as fanatical about privacy as some others).

I strongly believe that the second opinion is wrong, and, honestly, pretty much unworthy of response, but I’m going to waste a few seconds responding in brief. Why would anyone want to maintain privacy if they’re doing nothing (that they believe to be) wrong? What if an individual donated a small amount of money (low enough that it didn’t have to be publically released) to, say, Proposition 8 in California? Given the actions of anti-Proposition 8 activists since the election, I can absolutely understand why those individuals might want their donation to be kept private^[a].

The reason I’m writing this post, actually, is the third opinion that I’ve cited. Several Consumerist readers have written responses that read like this: “No one sat down and looked at every charge, they simply ran a database query.” Some of these responses even seem to indicate that no one at Mint even could look at your charges, even if they wanted to.

If no one can get access to a database, then it’s useless. If someone at Mint has the ability to write a query that says “select all records with a payee of ‘Adele Services’”, the ability to run that query on the Mint DB, and the ability to generate an e-mail notifying everyone who had a transaction in the resulting list of records that they may have been the victim of fraud, I am completely certain that same person has the ability to search for users who paid money to become a member of relatively-embarassing-website.com. I’m relatively certain that same person could also query the database to see every business their former (or even current) significant other is paying money to, assuming said (F)SO is a user of the service.

I’m not arguing that anyone at Mint would do these things^[b], only that they could, and whether they’re thumbing through physical records or running a query in a database is a trivial distinction.

1. Don’t like the politics of that example? What about those who are paying for an online dating service may want to keep it private. It isn’t wrong, but there’s certainly some social stigma. If you don’t mind your friends and family knowing that you’re using such a service, good for you, but what if you’re a little more reluctant? [↩]
2. I’m quite certain, in fact, that Mint.com has rules in place to keep such things from happening, and that they probably keep an eye on such things, but, then again, I would have thought the State of Ohio did, too… [↩]

1 down, 99 to go

I finished Blind Lake (by Robert Charles Wilson) today, and have started on book #2 on my Read 100 challenge, Peter David’s Darkness of the Light.

Blind Lake was a very good read. It was the first Robert Charles Wilson book I’ve read (I actually only picked it up because I was looking for his book Spin, which was apparently out when I went to the library), but it certainly won’t be the last.

What, exactly, does a gold library card do?

The Kanawha County Public Library is challenging its patrons to read 100 books this year:

In 2009 the Kanawha County Public Library system celebrates its 100th anniversary. To mark this event we’ll be offering special programs and displays throughout the year, plus we’re challenging our patrons to read 100 books.

Though the linked article doesn’t mention exactly what the prize might be, the book log says that participants who meet the challenge get a “special gold library card.” I have to admit, that appeals to me in a way similar to how achievements on Xbox Live or Kongregate will cause me to play games just to get a few points that are (ultimately) meaningless. I’d probably read 100 books this year anyway; why not join in the challenge?

Since only books checked out from the Kanawha County Public Library system count, I’ve only finished one book that might count (S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire), but since I actually checked that one out last year (and didn’t start reading it until Saturday), I’m not counting it.

Book #1, therefore, will be Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake, which I started during lunch.