Given that Murakami is 66-years-old, I imagine that the school he went to used paper and pencil&#x2F;ink to record transactions, and like most school libraries, failed to hire someone properly certified in data retention regulations who would have properly disposed of those records...I&#x27;m only being half-facetious here..I think you&#x27;re wondering if there is some machination resulting from a mass surveillance policy at play here...it could be something much more innocent: papers that are just stashed away in a school&#x27;s storage room:<p>&gt; The cards were apparently leaked to the paper after a volunteer who once taught at the school came across them while he was sorting out old library books that were to be thrown away.<p>The reason why we don&#x27;t hear about these kinds of data leakages is because paper usually gets thrown away. Or a building burns down&#x2F;floods. And also, paper records don&#x27;t come up in a Google search (which is the extent of &quot;research&quot; for many people today).<p>Why didn&#x27;t the school back then have a policy of throwing away cards after x number of years? Probably for the same reason why anything was done before computers became so ubiquitous...we constantly underestimate how the power of computation and networking changes the accessibility of information. Back when I graduated from college (and by this time, Google was a major player), no one really complained about printing people&#x27;s names (i.e. mostly students) in the police blotter. Now, I believe it is a rarity for a school newspaper that publishes online to also publish full names of the suspects, even though no federal&#x2F;state laws have been passed that would require such discretion. The reason why this practice is now rare is pretty common-sensical to us today, but not so much when Google was still relatively new.