EFF Urges Pressure On Google Over Book Search

angry tapir writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging its supporters to pressure Google to build significant privacy protections into its Book Search service. The EFF suggests that the service gives Google access to new personal information: what people are searching for in out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. The EFF posted its concerns with Google Book Search on its blog, with EFF designer/activist Hugh D'Andrade saying the search product could infringe on 'privacy of thought.' Google, in a responding blog post, said it will protect user privacy, though it can't yet say how — the service hasn't been designed yet, nor approved."

Comments

Doesn't that apply to, well, everything?

[jfengel]

Why are they calling it out for Google Book Search? Every search tells the company what the user was searching for. Every interaction with EVERY web page tells you something about the user. Every time you walk into a bricks-and-mortar store, you're letting the owner and everybody else in the vicinity know that you have some connection with what they sell.

It sounds like the EFF is looking for you to be private-in-public, and that's just not guaranteed. Users have a right to expect a certain good-faith effort on the part of people they transact with not go to blabbing it to everybody, and the more data they have the more we need to clarify what "good faith" means, but I don't understand why they're singling out Google Book Search of all the things in the world.

Re:Doesn't that apply to, well, everything?

[sbeckstead]

For the same reason that the Librarians have so far kept the cameras and tried to keep the FBI out of the library. Please I don't want somebody looking over my shoulder at what I want to read. I'm fine with the public search function on the search engine but this is a little too far.

Why difference for book vs blog?

[iamacat]

If you search slashdot using Google, the articles and comments you read are already used to deliver targeted advertisement and would probably be available to law enforcement. Why should searching an out-of-copyright book receive any more or less protection? If anything, the issues in old books are probably less related to present-day calamities than many of present-day blogs.

Re:Why difference for book vs blog?

[Crispy Critters]

This is a serious question.

Part of the answer is history and expectation. Society has had libraries for many years where you can search for information without leaving any record of what you are doing. It is not crazy to think that big musty buildings full of old paper books are going to start to disappear in my lifetime. Instead, people will have Google books, where what we read is recorded.

This represents a loss in privacy. On the other hand, my web searches were never private to begin with. You can argue reasonably that what privacy we end up with is more important than what is lost; that's a difference of opinion.

Reminds me of a principle from the Xanadu project.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

One of Ted Nelson's insights that went into the planning of the Xanadu hypertext project: To replace paper publication you first have to do all the useful things it does at least as well as it did.

This is an instance of that: Once they're out of the store or library (and ignoring quibbles about DNA analysis of fingerprint material if a copy is later recovered by forensic types) dead-tree books don't leave a handy record of who read them. Reading a "book" on an electronic server does, as does purchasing and downloading a copy. (And DRM is explicitly designed to keep those copies from circulating, so additional readers have to go back to the source and leave additional tracks.)

AHA! Another argument against DRM and the DMCA: Loss of the readers' right to privacy.