Today, Fred Stutzman revealed a particularly troublesome example of how relying on the “My Library” feature of Google Book Search might mean you have even less privacy with regard to your online intellectual endeavors:

I was shocked to find out that saving a book to your library requires that the book be added to your “shared library”, a public listing tied to your Google account.

There is no way to save a book privately in Google Booksearch.  As Google writes in their FAQ, “When you add reviews, ratings, notes, or labels to a book—or when you add a book to your my Library page—that information will be publicly displayed on Google Book Search.”  They go on to write that “No matter where you use these features, the information you submit will be displayed publicly.”

I couldn’t believe it either.  If you want to set up a Google Library, even if it is just for convenience sake, you have to show the world what you’ve been reading.  As far as I can tell, there’s no good technical or legal reason why one can’t save a book privately, or limit their book-sharing to a group of friends.  This decision seems arbitrary and downright scary (or at least terribly ill-advised).

Stutzman points out the incongruence between Google’s policy and the American Library Association’s longstanding code of ethics, bill of rights, and core values, including their commitment to protecting patron privacy:

I must wonder why Google is not adhering to ALA policy, and the broader cultural norm of protecting library patron privacy.  As Google partners with large institutions and attempts to monetize Booksearch, failing to respect patron privacy seems foolish and potentially dangerous.  A patron researching a sensitive topic, or a topic that reveals information about the patron (for example, books about a health condition) will have their information revealed publicly if they add such a book to their library.

I also suggest a read of the comment thread on Stutzman’s post, where a suggestion has been made (channelling Zuckerberg) that all your favorited books should be public in an ideal world. Stutzman aptly counters such a proposition.

This is a serious design flaw (or a seriously flawed design decision). Google must act quickly to give users control over which books in their library are publicly viewable.

Siva Vaidhyanathan (a professor in my department, btw) has posted reader comments from his original request for feedback as to some of the concerns with of Google’s plan to digitize library books. He was kind enough to include my repsonse, as well as the insight of Jessamyn (who Siva describes as a “major voice in the library community”). Here’s Jessamyn’s contribution:

A lot of my concerns were summed up in this article by Wade Roush, particularly the ownership of information issue.

While I understand why Google feels entitled to dictate terms of use on content they have “value added” through scanning and digitization to, it’s a far cry from making that material flat-out AVAILABLE — for whatever you want, for whatever you can imagne — the way the library did, and does.

Google indexes my web site but Google does not own my web site. From the article:

“The Michigan library, says Wilkin, may do whatever it likes with the digital scans of its own holdings—as long as it doesn’t share them with companies that could use them to compete with Google. Such limitations may prove uncomfortable, but most librarians say they can live with them, considering that their holdings wouldn’t be digitized at all without Google’s help.”

Brewster Kahle’s doors metaphor is worth learning.

It really looks like this will increase access at low cost, but that’s different — especially in other countries — from no cost. I suppose one could argue that having one copy of a book in one location places prohibitive costs on someone who is not at that location in the current library model, but the larger library network that you can reach via interlibrary loan and co-operative sharing takes care of a lot of that, assuming people know about it.

In short, it’s going to happen. Libraries can play more of a leadership role both in preserviing access to these materials and keeping Google in check when they try to use their massive computing systems and storage banks to increase their own market share for their advertising. Putting this sort of knowledge-is-power power in the hands of a publicly held company [even one that does no evil] which has certain shareholder obligations, is concerning to me.

Posted by: jessamyn at June 3, 2005 08:50 AM

The broadest issue is the widespread acceptance of the “Google paradigm” for organizing, distributing and accessing information. Google has become the “center of gravity” for information navigation and knowledge acquisition, a situation that requires critical examination.

Additionally, privacy advocates fear Google’s ability to track user’s library usage as they access texts via the Google Print project, compounding the privacy concerns related to personalized search.

Technorati tag: Google Print

InsideGoogle points to this report about a group of academic publishers concerned about Google’s plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index:

The plan “appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale,” wrote Peter Givler, the executive director for the New York-based trade group.

The association asked Google to respond to a list of 16 questions seeking more information about how the company plans to protect copyrights.

Two unnamed publishers already asked Google to withhold its copyrighted material from the scanners, but the company hasn’t complied with the requests, Givler wrote.

Similar copyright concerns were expressed earlier this year at Harvard.

This Harvard Crimson article discusses concerns that the Google Print lirary project to digitize books at Harvard’s libraries (among others) may infringe copyright law. The debate is whether Google’s digitization efforts fall within “fair use” or are “illegal duplication” (note this appears to concern only those books not yet in the public domain).

“The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitisation is) by a commercial organisation of works that are still in copyright,” [Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers] wrote. “It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied.”

Morris wrote that Google needs to obtain permission from publishers before using their work. While she wrote that it may be impractical to ask every publisher, Google should ask permission through collective licensing organizations.

But Jonathan Zittrain, faculty co-director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an e-mail that he believes the pilot project is not a copyright infringement.

“This is what fair use is designed for,” he wrote. “By showing only snippets, the market for the books themselves is not harmed.”

TechNewsWorld reports that The National Library of France is not happy with Google’s effort to scan and integrate millions of books into its Web search. Jean-Noel Jeanneney, President of the library, wrote in an editorial that he is concerned Google’s initiative to digitalize volumes at five leading libraries will reflect a unipolar worldview dominated by the English language and American culture:

“I favor a multi-polar view of the world in the 21st century,” he told the agency.

“I don’t want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States.”

France’s top librarian wants Europe to develop its own online library program and Internet search engines in order to protect French and other European languages and culture from American influence.

The fear is that Google, being an American company, will focus mainly on English-language books and American interpretations on events. Further, as a commenter at Slashdot noted:

there is a point to be made here about the state of the internet in general. nearly half of the world’s population are indian or chinese. they have cultures and histories longer and deeper than that of western europe and certainly north america. yet, on the web those cultures are all but invisible. history, it seems, will no longer be “written by the victor” but “written by those with a broadband internet connection”.

While its easy to poke fun at what appears to be yet another Internet-related French identity crisis, there are large issues at play here, including the hegemony of the West in general, and the United States in particular, in the creation & distribution of content on the Internet, the pervasiveness of Google, and the general implications of the Googlization of more and more of the world’s information.