How can I stop everyone seeing my library?

Hi, I've just joined LibraryThing, and it looks very useful but I'm concerned about privacy. Sharing ideas on books can be great, but whereas on social media you can choose your friends and restrict your posts to them and their friends, the default set up on Library Thing looks like it opens your library up to complete strangers. For instance, I'm planning on using tags to identify where my books are in my house - if I had some very rare books for instance, announcing to the world that I had a valuable first edition of Harry Potter (I don't!) in my front room might be an open invitation to a thief!

I can also envisage problems for people who live in parts of the world where, say, being gay is illegal. They might catalogue their collection of gay fiction on what they think is their own personal account, and not be aware that everyone in the world can see their entire catalogue.

I've only added two books so far, but I'm not really comfortable with sharing everything I own with anonymous strangers. The Privacy statement on LibraryThing's Privacy Policy says "LibraryThing will not sell or give personally-identifiable information to any third party. This would be evil, and we are not evil.", but in fact by default LibraryThing *is* giving personally identifiable information (a person's entire book collection) to anyone who access their website, even if they're not a member.

Any comments and suggestions very welcome!

Chris.

There are two settings for libraries here on LT:
Public and Private

Public means people can see your library and anything you do with it, like reviews and tags. This also means any user can help with questions about combining or data issues.

Private means we know it exists, but only admin can work with issues because no one else can see what you're asking about with regard to your library.

Unlike Facebook and other social media sites, you aren't required to use your real name to create your account. So the only way sharing what's in your library becomes problematic is if you chose to use your name.

Ah, thanks very much Gilroy, that's very useful indeed! I did use my real name when signing up.

>1 ChrisMitchell: On your profile, there is a link on the right side of the page that says "edit profile and account"
From there, you can click on "Account settings" on the left, and you will be able to change your account type from "public" to "private"

You could also set some of your books as "private books" via the "edit book" page for those books, though this is a beta feature and complete privacy is not guaranteed.

If you are okay with people knowing what books you have but would like to add private information about them, like where they are located in your house, each book has a "private comments" field that is not visible to the public.

As >2 gilroy: says, there is no requirement to associate any of your personal information with this site. If you would like to request a username change, you can go to the previously mentioned "edit profile and account" and click on "change or delete" on the left side.

(For the record, I work in the medical privacy field and the contents of one's book collection definitely does not count as personally-identifiable information.)

>4 norabelle414: It is very much not advisable to use the "private books" feature, as it was never finished and is quite buggy. It's not about failure of privacy (that might possibly be a thing but if it is, I've not personally seen comment of it), it's that books wind up in a weird half-added state, inaccessible to anyone, account holder included.

>1 ChrisMitchell: LT is not giving away personally identifiable information. You alone can give that out, by using your actual name for your account name, by displaying your location, choosing to favorite shops/check in to locations, etc. If you do not do those things, and merely catalog books, no one will have a clue where in the world you are located, let alone anything more specific about you.

Expanding on >4 norabelle414: and >5 .Monkey.:, you have the option to change the username for your LT account at any time, if you'd rather not have it associated with your real name. This will also change the username on any posts (like here, on Talk) or other site activity. To change your username, go into your Account Settings and click "Change or delete" in the left-hand menu.

And I'd like to echo what .Monkey. said in >5 .Monkey.:. The private books feature is not completed at this point, and I wouldn't recommend using it.

>5 .Monkey.: Ah thanks, I knew there were problems with private books but I didn't know it was that bad. I'll retract my suggestion.

Is there a quick way to see books that have that checkbox ticked in your own library?

>8 mene: No, that's part of the problem with the not-released-out-of-beta feature that is the "Private book" check box. If you want your books to be private, I highly recommend making your entire library private, at this point. You can change that setting for your account at any time in Account Settings

Thank you sharing this post. It is helpful many person like me!

Hi, I'd like to share a link to a specific collection, without marking my entire library public. Is there a way to do that?

I know how to find the permanent link to a collection, but I see that when my library is marked private, this link does not work.

The motivation for this request is that I have several books in my collection, not all of which I which to share with certain groups. I'd like a way to share specific collections links, privately to one more more individuals/groups.

>11 verhohlen: The quickest way is to just make a second account that has only those books you want to make public, and keep your own library private.

Quickest and only way. LT doesn't support partially private libraries.

It might be more work than you're interested in doing, but you could configure TinyCat to only show the specific collections you want to share, and then give people that link. It would only work if you wanted to share the same collections with everyone, though. You couldn't set it up to show one particular collection to one group of people, and another collection to a separate group.

>14 rosalita: I doubt that TinyCat will work with private accounts.

Oh, good point. I hadn't even considered that.