Seattle Public Library And The Naked Feed

A while ago, Seattlest broke the news to no one (to judge from the comments) that Seattle Public Library was offering fun RSS feeds based on your account information: items checked out, items on hold, and so forth. Handy, yes?

Yes, but it turns out that there are still a few bugs in the system. If for some reason, Poindexter, you're a huge library exhibitionist and posted these feeds in a public forum (such as your blog or RSS aggregator), you may want to rethink that. Says the library:

The Seattle Public Library cares about the privacy of your personal information. Patrons who use public RSS aggregator Web sites, such as Bloglines, Rojo or Feedster, are cautioned that some of these services allow other users of the service to read your RSS feeds. This means that other people can view information regarding items you have checked out or have placed on hold. Usually you can control this by using an option in your profile or in the setup of the feed to mark it "private" or "public."

Plus, what was particularly "b0rken" (as the kids say) about your old RSS feed's link was that it included somewhere in it your account barcode and PIN, which is not the sort of information you want to broadcast to just anyone. Because the library is updating all the feeds to a more secure format, subscribers will need to unsubscribe from their old "Hack my SPL account, please" RSS feed and resubscribe to the new, securitastic version.

That is all.