Wow. Anyone been following the Google book Settlement? Yes, I capitalized the "S" in settlement, because it has turned into a sentient being and will be scanning our thoughts before we even have them...ok, not that bad, but damn is it long and complicated.
I have been following it casually over the last year and was kind of hum drum about it. Yeah, Google wants to scan everything ever printed in the universe and let people have access to it (a little bit of a hyperbole, but hey, let's run with it). As a person who thinks information should be open and free to anyone and everyone I thought this was a great idea.
This is why I am a librarian and not a lawyer.
I never once thought of the privacy issue.
I thought about the money issue, but I thought about it in the downloading music sense. Like the RIAA was going to go after my 12 year old neighbor for downloading some scream-o band. Bands don't make that much money off of music sales, they make money on tours and merchandising. I could care less about the record company, quite frankly, because they didn't write the song or play the music, so screw 'em.
But I digress...
Privacy. I have been diving more and more into this because we don't realize how much stuff is out there. We blog, we post things on facebook and twitter. We take videos and pictures and post them on the internet for the world to see. And once it's on the internet, honey, it never really goes away. Just because you hit that delete button 50 times doesn't mean a thing.
I will post another blog entry on that later.
But Google poses a privacy problem with this book settlement. I was reading the Fairness Reading Report done by James Grimmelman
and something jumped out at me. Cindy Cohn, speaking for the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), brought up a big privacy issue. She said that Google "can track not just what books you read, but which pages, and what you scribble in the margins."
Think about that for a minute.
Yes, you say, but If I order a book on Amazon, how is this different? "Cohn gave the second-best answer to a question all day: unlike Amazon, Google will be able to track what you read after you buy."
Now, let that set in for a second.
And guess what?
It's get's better? Oh, yes.
The government can get that information without a court order. Yep, requiring a court order isn’t the law yet.
Having fun?
How seriously does Google take privacy?
Take a a look at the problem with Google Buzz.
The short of it is that "The problem is that -- by default -- the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile." So anyone can go in and see who you've been chatting with and e-mailing on the list.
The other problem I started seeing with the Google Settlement is that all of the information Google collects is now Google's information. As in, if they decide to censor it we would be none the wiser.
I'm not saying that Google would do that, I'm just saying they could. In fact Google has done some great things in China with censoring of the internet (or rather opening it up for the Chinese people). They are trying to stop the government from telling the people what they can and cannot search for. If you want to see what China censors, go here. It's pretty startling when you think of it from a free perspective.
Could that happen to us?
