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Librarians Express Concern Over Google Books
angry tapir writes "Many libraries routinely delete borrower information, and organizations such as the American Library Association have fought hard to preserve the privacy of their patrons in the face of laws such as the US Patriot Act. But now, as more and more titles become available in Google Book Search, it's not clear whether digital readers will enjoy the same privacy protections they have at the library."
Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Whether it's your G-Mail contact list, your search history, or what books you check out from from their "library," your data is Google's stock in trade. This is the price of "free." For most people, it's a much better than even proposition. For the paranoid and privacy conscious, it's a deal breaker. And the notion that Google is providing this information to the US government is merely an urban myth, so get that idea right out of your head this instant...
I have worked in a few libraries, public and private, both as paid or volunteer help, and don't know of any that deleted user information or information on who checked out books.
They may of archived the information and removed it from the main databases but the information was still available for years after the event.
The most a library really needs to record are who are the last 2 people who checked out material, after that you there is no way of proving someone else damaged it. If you want metrics on the types or specific information on the number of check-outs that can be done without attaching a specific user to a piece of material.
Few places have a legal requirement that libraries store user information and if they did not store if beyond what is needed to track who has something checked out or could of damaged material they would not have problems in proving this information since it would not exist.
Google is making the books searchable with one intent in mind, to know what you are searching for, so they can offer relevant ads and targeted marketing leads.
April 28, 2005, American Librarians Association President Carol Brey - Casiano responds to Oversight Hearing on Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act
"Using the public library is one of the benefits of living in our free and democratic society. The First Amendment promises everyone in the United States a fundamental right of free speech and free inquiry. Every person is entitled to read anything about a topic or opinion without the government looking over his or her shoulder. When there is evidence of a crime or evidence that a crime is about to be committed, law enforcement officers can obtain search warrants and subpoenas permitting them to access the records of the suspected criminal.
"Library patrons use our nation's libraries with an expectation of privacy because in 48 states, laws declare that a person's library records are private and confidential; the remaining two states, Kentucky and Hawaii, have attorneys' general opinions recognizing the confidentiality of library records. All of these laws existed before the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted.
"The USA PATRIOT Act preempts the privacy protections provided by state library confidentiality laws, which balance protection of library patron records with the needs of law enforcement. Because the USA PATRIOT Act does not require the FBI to name an individual or to give specific reasons to believe he is engaged in terrorism, Section 215 has the potential to open patrons' reading and research records to a 'fishing expedition.'
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Google books, OTOH, is just a collection of pages. The pages you read are part of their database, which they will use to understand and better serve the user, and, if the committee on un-American affairs come knocking, will likely give up quite willingly. Furthermore, while modern database search has become very easy, researching a topic is still not trivial. Serious searches will still turn up more trivia than useful fact. If we confuse google with a library, there is a chance that our educational opportunities might become limited. The child that wants to read about their emerging sexuality, for example, instead of just playing it out through naked pictures, may not be able to do so. This is an unknown thing,and there is nothing wrong with thinking about ramifications, as long as we realize this thing is going to happen no matter what.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Google, the world's largest non-evil corporation, has released Google Books Stalkertude(tm), which allows you to share your location, your reading, your DNA and your tastes in porn in real time with your dearest friends from all your social networks and blogs, that guy your friend gave your LiveJournal username to when you were both drunk and anyone you've ever sent or received a message to or from on GMail. And your boss.
Google Books Stalkertude(tm) allows you to broadcast where you are and what you're thinking about at all times. It supports all current smartphones except that stupid iThing from Cupertino. If you're using Google Chrome, you can automatically share your location from your laptop too! The laptop maintains and archives a complete record of your life in text, video and audio form with the twelve built-in webcams and microphones dotted around the casing, plus samples of your DNA from the keys. The data is transmitted to the Google servers for your comfort and convenience and remains absolutely and entirely confidential between you and Google's marketing department. Tasteful and understated text ads are subliminally woven into the display pixels.
Privacy features are important to Google Books Stalkertude(tm). You can trust us with your entire life record, even as we argue in court over Google StreetView that privacy doesn't exist in the modern world. Besides, better we have your complete dossier than Microsoft, right? And we'll only give it to the government if they, like, ask for it or something. That we've gathered so much data on you in the first place is in no way a danger to you. We promise we won't tell your husband, and that's what counts.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Then Google should do things the right way, the first time, and then nobody would stand up to criticize them.
In this case, all Google has to do is say that information about who read what book will -not- be stored, and this 'concern' goes away. It's a legit concern, and easily rectified.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"it won't make untrackable but nothing really is"
QFT. You are not anonymous because you're so smart, you're anonymous because nobody cares enough to track you down. Be very careful not to change that.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Librarians are also concerned because they see the writing on the wall. Libraries may not be needed in the near future. We have the technology today to make every book in existence available to every human on the planet, and in an instantly-searchable format. This is the sort of thing a global Renaissance is made of! The only thing holding humanity back, at this point, is politics. We have IP law that relies on artificial scarcity. This is the opposite of what the goal of IP should be.
The purpose of IP law should be to encourage science and the useful arts while making their benefits available to everyone.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
advocated by one of the groups of workers who stand to lose the most from having a vast body of literature made easily available to individuals
Google Books doesn't return the whole book for you to read, so I don't see how Google Books could do anything but HELP libraries. You remember a passage, look it up on Google Books, you then have the ISBN making it easier to get the book from the library where, unlike Google or Amazon, you can read the whole book for free.
What am I missing here?
Free Martian Whores!
Yea, but torrents still don't have the selection (or diversity of subjects) of books that libraries have. I've tried to find a lot of fairly popular books, but aside from well-known classics or very very mainstream titles (e.g. Harry Potter), you'll be hard pressed to find on torrents. And even then, book torrents tend to have very short shelf-lives (no pun intended). I often come across torrents of books I'm searching for, only to find that they were posted 2-3 years ago and are long dead.
Google Book Search was such a promising project. And the company itself has proven to be trustworthy (with them resisting government subpoenas and fighting to withhold user data from government agencies, unlike some other megacorporations). I was so disappointed when it was complaints over copyright violations by publishers rather than any technological or resource limitations that crippled the project (basically killing the project as it was originally conceived). So instead of giving every child, every student, and indeed every person with a computer and internet connection, free and instant access to all the literature humanity has ever published (ie. the largest corpus of human knowledge ever compiled) in a fully indexed, cataloged, and searchable digital format, we instead just have a small dappling of publisher-provided promotional samples of old, semi-obscure texts that aren't selling that well in stores.
Somehow we decided as a society (we're supposedly a "democracy" after all) that commercial profits are more important than the huge boon to society that such a cultural & informational/educational resource would have been. It would have been less of an affront if it had been a coalition of authors who objected to the project's existence in its original form. And even if publishers are worried that this would have threatened their profits, it would have been far more preferable to work out some kind of deal in which the digital library would be publicly-subsidized, with that money being used to compensate publishers (within reason). I'd be willing to pay more in taxes to support such a project.
Just like public education caused a cultural revolution (or evolution) in our society, I imagine making published materials so much more accessible, and to so many more people, in one fell swoop would have similarly caused an intellectual revolution (internationally). Every computer would immediately become the largest library in the world. Access to books won't ever be limited by the number of physical copies available. Out of print books would never again be lost to society. And people for whom the library is currently not accessible—whether because they have none located near them, lack transportation, are bed-ridden, are blind, or have been subjected to a recent book-burning campaign—would benefit unimaginably from such a resource. I mean, you could go to rural village in a poor developing country, and as long as they had a phone line (you could even get internet access by satellite) you'd be able to set up a $300 computer with a screen reader and give the children in that village access to all the books ever published, even if everyone in the village is illiterate.
The internet itself has been a huge boon to society, but as useful as it is now, it would be a million times more useful if copyright issues took backseat to societal progress and public good.