Does a library know what people do on their computers?

[Dimitri]

Just so you are not imagining nefarious reasons for why I'm asking this, I'm doing research for school regarding how much libraries monitor their user's activity on the internet.

I sent an email to a library asking whether they monitor their users' internet activity on their computers (the library computers, not the user's laptops) and they just said they ask for the user's ID, they write down the computer they used and the time that they used it.

I can't imagine they would take this information unless they can somehow see what was viewed and accessed on each individual computer, presumably they are taking the person's ID and the number of the computer and the time so that they can link them to the activity on that particular computer at that particular time.

So what I'm wondering is is that technically possible?

 

[beers]

Depends, but it's really easy to just proxy traffic and timestamp every URL that passes through it. You can also log DNS requests from a local nameserver and see which PC requested what URLs. There's some screen recording software like Bomgar that can rewind what you've been doing and play it back later.