Civil Liberties Advocates Lobby for Strong Privacy Protection on Google Books

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkley, has sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, arguing that Google Books should provide at least the same level or privacy for readers as libraries and bookstores currently do.

"If you suspect you may have a serious disease, you can go into a bookstore and browse for books about your illness, find one that's useful, and buy it with cash. And you can rest assured that your insurance premiums won't increase as a result, because there is no way your insurance company can find out about your choice of reading material," Hugh D'Andrade, designer/activist with the EFF, explains.

This could change with Google's effort to digitize millions of books and make them available for search, preview and acquisition. Now that the Mountain View giant has reached a yet-to-be-approved settlement agreement (PDF) with book publishers and authors that will allow it to index even more books, the race is on to expand the Google Books service.

In their joint letter (PDF) sent to Eric Schmidt, the privacy advocates point out that Google currently tracks what books users search, browse and read, which is of great concern. "Given the long and troubling history of government and third party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search," they write.

The requests made to the company include, but are not limited to, promising not to release records about readers, unless served with a properly issued warrant, keeping the logs of book searching, browsing and previewing for a maximum of 30 days and allowing users to delete records from their purchase history.

The civil liberties groups also ask for readers to be clearly notified about what information about them and their activities gets collected, as well as to be alerted when this has been disclosed and why. "Google needs to develop a robust, enforceable privacy policy and publish the number and type of demands for reader information that are received on an annual basis," the letter reads.

Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, has responded to these concerns on the company's Public Policy Blog. "We have a strong privacy policy in place now for Google Books and for all Google products. But our settlement agreement hasn't yet been approved by the court, and the services authorized by the agreement haven't been built or even designed yet. That means it's very difficult (if not impossible) to draft a detailed privacy policy," he explains.

Even so, Clancy goes on to say that he is confident that, whatever the final service will look like, its users will benefit from strong privacy protection. Meanwhile, the EFF encourages users to send a message to Google's CEO in order to ask for their privacy rights to be protected.