Bug 41737

Summary: Page title (and thus browser history) exposes patron names, other unnecessary PII
Product: Koha Reporter: Jake Bateman <jake.bateman>
Component: Staff interfaceAssignee: Bugs List <koha-bugs>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Testopia <testopia>
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P5 - low CC: gmcharlt
Version: Main   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
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Crowdfunding goal: 0 Patch complexity: ---
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Attachments: An example of the floating/quick history menu in Edge displaying full patron names, after a staff user has logged out of Koha.

Description Jake Bateman 2026-01-30 11:53:06 UTC
Created attachment 192234 [details]
An example of the floating/quick history menu in Edge displaying full patron names, after a staff user has logged out of Koha.

We've recently had a library express privacy concerns relating to the exposure of full patron names, along with application verbs like "issuing to" and "modify user" in the page title, which propagates to browser history and persists after a staff interface logout.

While live page titles and browser history of computers used by administrative staff should be considered "not for viewing by unauthenticated users", some cases of computer-sharing or shoulder-surfing in a library setting seems highly likely. This inclusion of full names in page titles to me does not seem strictly necessary. In some testing, we find that a popular CRM also exposes names like this in page titles, while the administrative pages of Gitea and Cloudflare seem to make an explicit effort not to do so. Do we think this warrants changing?

I do feel this problem can most effectively be mitigated with process changes, but the question remains; could Koha minimise PII exposure here without impacting functionality?
Comment 1 Owen Leonard 2026-01-30 12:13:26 UTC
Perhaps the HidePatronName system preference should be extended to apply to page titles?