Evil settlement aside, I’m a fan of Google Booksearch. The ability to search within books is tremendously useful, and I look forward to the day that I’ve got a digital copy of all of the books on my shelves.
Until recently, I’ve kept track of interesting books in Google Booksearch by bookmarking them in my browser. This approach isn’t scaling well, so I decided to take advantage of Google’s native features by saving the books to my “Google Library.” 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).
The cognitive dissonance comes from comparisons of Google’s Library policy to traditional libraries. Prominent in the ALA Code of Professional Ethics for Librarians is section 40.2.3: “We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.” The ALA also formally recommends that library administrators “advise all librarians and library employees that such records shall not be made available to any agency of state, federal, or local government except pursuant to such process, order or subpoena as may be authorized under the authority of, and pursuant to, federal, state, or local law relating to civil, criminal, or administrative discovery procedures or legislative investigative power.” (for more on regulation and library records see Minow, 2002)
Therefore, 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.
Google is clearly wrong on this issue, and must work to fix this dangerous privacy oversight. Have other librarians addressed this issue? Has Google responded? Unfortunately most of my due-dilligence for this post found articles/blog posts about the booksearch settlement, but I’d like to hear some other opinions.
Update: The Google Booksearch FAQ states that users may delete their data from public records. However, the link they provide doesn’t work (it is a 404), and it appears you have to delete all of your records (“Delete book search”) to remove book history from the public view.
