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.
Tags: booksearch, google
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
As far as I’m concerned, libraries have no credibility whatsoever when it comes to protecting patron privacy. I’d hope that libraries would only hand over patron records in response to a court order — such as a warrant or subpoena. The ALA’s weasel words about “administrative discovery procedures” simply illuminate the possibility of warrantless searches. Something the ALA is apparently happy to go along with.
The town I live in has some number of illegal immigrants. I don’t see how the library could say with a straight face that it won’t turn over names and addresses to the USCIS (aka INS). The library, by the way, does not publish a privacy policy on its web site.
Practically, libraries are limited by the records they keep. This is why many libraries either expunge or maintain records for a specified period. While a number of states have laws that protect library records, there is no way a library can feasibly get around subpoenas or extra-legal procedures such as National Security Letters.
Of course, the adoption and maintenance of privacy policies (and records management policies) are individual to the library and system. So there will be variation in adoption and enforcement. I’ve been very pleased with UNC’s libraries, as they make a special effort to inform the patron every time a transferrable record is created.
The 404 link you pointed out has now been fixed.
Good deal. There are a number of other inconsistencies in the Booksearch FAQ/Help docs.
Let’s hope that this policy can get fixed as fast as that 404!
Something tells me that you don’t have a public Facebook or MySpace profile page? :) I don’t use the My Library feature on Google Books but I’m pretty sure that it is designed as a way for users to share with others what their favorite books are. It takes an explicit user action to add a click to that list. It is not analogous at all to a list of books that you check out or read at your local library. The list of books that you read on Google Books aren’t made public in any way that I can tell. If I wanted to bookmark some favorite books on a site like Google Books in a private way, I’d just add the pages as bookmarks in my browser. It’s just a web site after all. Personally, I prefer a world where the default is “public” and everyone can contribute to the effort of finding great content on the web. That’s the beauty of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Tyler:
Until a few days ago, there were no such things as public Facebook pages, so no.
The Google “My Library” feature is just that, a collection of books a user adds to their personal library. There is nothing inherently social about this feature; it works just as well privately, semi-privately, or publicly.
I’m glad you prefer a world where the default is public. That is your personal opinion and you’re certainly entitled. The problem with applying this to Google Booksearch is that 1) the default is the only option and 2) marginalized populations, people who seek privacy, or users unaware of the ins and outs of “sharing” are placed at risk due to unintentional disclosure.
Fixing this problem doesn’t stop people from contributing “to the effort of finding great content on the web.” It simply corrects a bad policy with bad defaults, one that was likely enacted to make this product seem “social.”
Finally, if we want to make analogies, then browsing books in GB is analogous to browsing your library bookshelves. Adding them to your personal library for reference is not exactly the same thing as checking them out, but as GB attempts to monetize book access (i.e. a user will have to check a book out to access full text), then it will be very near parity. I can imagine that libraries that license the GB corpus will feel very strongly that a “digital checkout” should not generate a public record.