Questions of Privacy Around Google Book Search.

Our reporter's piece on Google Book Search was published today at one hour and 11 minutes into KPFA's morning show. (Update: Also made available at PRX)

Eric's piece was followed by Peer Review Editor Brian Edwards-Tiekert interviewing Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law at UC Berkeley discussing issues around the "fairness hearing" which is set for February 18th.

Below is a transcript of the audio piece Eric put together. Scroll down to the very bottom to listen to the audio embeds.

We will continue to fundraise for this piece until Wednesday at which point, we will close it up. We can't thank you enough for your continued support.

A transcript

Suggested Host Lead:
In 2004, Google launched the ambitious plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online. Then authors and publishers sued, sparking a massive dispute over the comlpexities of   copyright law. Now that lawsuit is working its way toward a settlement with the next big step being a fairness hearing on Febreary 18th. A number of groups and individuals are trying to block the Google Books deal, including privacy watchdogs. Eric Klein reports:  

KLEIN:

Nicole Ozer is the technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU of Northern California. She says that Google's real interest in digitizing the world's libraries is not to sell e-books, but to obtain more information about who we are and what we read.

OZER:

You sort of have to imagine a world where someone followed you around the library or the book store and they took notes on who you are and what books you picked up and then they were able to follow you home and read over your shoulder and take more notes about every page you read and how long you read each page – even what you wrote down in the margins. If you imagine that world – that world is actually google books.

Of course, no one would force you to use Google Books. But going without it would be as awkward as using the internet without a search engine.  It's  bringing the dewey decemil system into the digital age.

The same way Google helped make the entire internet more useful about 2 decades ago when it revolutionized web searches – now it's trying the do the same thing for all of the world's books. Part of the business model will be to sell books – digital copies as well as ink and paper – but hopes to cash in on the data it will collect about individual users. That's got privacy watchdog groups sounding the alarm

JESCHKE TEASER:

Google doesn't need to be evil for evil things to happen.  
Rebeeca Jeschke is a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

JESCHKE

They collect a massive amount of information on you. They collect less now than they have in the past, but still google knows a lot about you.  
Less now, in part, because of pressure from privacy groups like EFF. Google now keeps up to 18 months worth of search terms linked to each user, which is shorter than “forever” - but a lot more than EFF thinks is necessary or for that matter, healthy.

Again Nicole Ozer

OZER

These companies that are relying on a targeted advertisizing model to make money are monetizing very private details about our lives. When you're not paying with money you're usually paying with your private information.
Now if Google was keeping these extensive dossiers in it's own private vault that would be one thing. But the ACLU and EFF say that The Internet's biggest destination web sites are also giving private information away.
Nicole Ozer says that Google (and Facebook) have extensive staffs dedicated to responding to requests  from third parties and law enforcement  - and they are handing it over without judicial oversight.   


OZER:

That's not because the companies are evil that's because the federal privacy laws that are supposed to be controlling access to electronic data was written in 1986, before the internet as we know it even existed.
1986 – before most people  had email accounts, or online social networks. Before people used the web to meet friends, find news, and pay bills. Before “google” was a verb.

OZER:

Most of these things, the data that these companies collect aren't encompassed by this privacy law. So if Google collects information about who you are and what you search for and the government comes to ask for it the law says that Google turns that over with a supena. No judicial oversight. The same thing for location information.  The same thing for anything other than content on facebook – what you click on and what you do and who you know.  
In September 2009 the ACLU and EFF filed an official objection to the proposed settlement of the Google Books lawsuit.

They asked that Google Books increase user control and transperancy, delete all user information after 30 days, and most importantly – reject all third party requests for reader information that don't come with a court order

OZER - “If the Governement comes knocking we're going to tell them they need to come back with a warant.”
Two dozen authors and publishers signed onto the objection. One was Julian

Dibbell

He's a non-fiction writer and tech journalist who writes for Wired magazine, and has published two books about online gaming culture.  
Dibbell is still very excited about the Google Books project, because of how it will broaden access to so much written history. But  - he's also concerned the settlement is about to give Google a defacto monopoly over a good portion of that history.

DIBBELL

“Maybe a corporation is not the ideal entity to undertake this project”
There's a lot of potential for abuse. Google could limit access to books. It could price gouge. And its data gathering could spell the end of reader privacy:

DIBBELL

If you have just one Hub where everyone goes to read in the digital age, then its much easier for third parties, government or hackers to go find out about you.   

They don't have to go checking from place to place. Nicloe Ozer:

OZER

Google really wants a court to let it become sort of a one stop shop for reading, but do nothing to make sure that it also is not a one stop shop for the government being able to spy on the private lives of americans.

DIBBELL

It makes it cheaper to invade people's privacy. In that sense it's not so much the technology itself as the consolidation of the market that makes it easier to invade people's privacy.
Julian Dibbell would like to preserve the culture of privacy rights that we enjoy at libraries and book stores.

DIBBELL

The idea that books can come along with us into the digital age is great because that preserves for us that mode of thinking even in the midst of this digital explosion. And yet whats crucial about that is that you are alone with that book. Just you and your thoughts and nobody looking over your shoulder (as everyone is when you are on twitter) or as definitly somebody is when you're reading the web in China. You are alone with that book. The idea that that private relationship with books would be threatened as we move forward into the digital age is really kind of disasterous. In fact it should be strengthened if anything because we need that space, we'll need to preserve that space in order to preserve the health of the intellectual ecology.
Take  Debbie Nathan who writes for New York Magazine and The Nation.  

NATAHAN

“I think probably a day doesn't go by that I don't use Google Books in my own research. I'm looking for something – I type in some key words over in “books” and a bunch of stuff comes up and I poke around and I say 'wow, this book looks really interesting,' and I either go over to a book seller on the left side of the page and I order that book or I find the nearest library and I go read that book.

Nathan often writes about sexuality – and her research often takes her to the margins of what's considered appropriate in mainstream society.  
Her most recent book – written for the teenagers in clear and sober language – is titled “Pornography.” 

Nathan says just knowing her privacy is vulnerable can have a chilling effect. For example, she recently sought out and read a book written by a man who was advocating for lowering of the age of consent.

NATHAN

I could imagine somebody doing research like myself who would be very very worried about looking at that on google.
And that could leave gaps in our understanding of controversial subjects

NATHAN

I'm not so scared of it but a lot of people really are, which is the problem, because when people are scared of an idea the government will just take that idea and run with it and put out a lot of disinformaiton.

For instance Nathan says that the Federal Government has used the false specter of a massive epidemic of on line child pornography to justify spying on Internet use under the PATRIOT Act. Research like hers can de-bunk fears that child pornography is on the rise, but not if people are afraid to do that research in the first place.  

Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that reader privacy is a free speech issue.

JESCHKE

people forget is that our first amendment right to speak also includes our first amendment right to read. To hear what other people have to say. Its something that our courts have always recognized. That the right to speak and express yourself doesn't mean anything unless people are able to hear it.  
And if people feel like someone's looking over their shoulders, they might censor their own reading. Again, author, Julian Dibbell:

DIBBELL

This is bad for the culture of reading that we have inherited. Books and the emergence of books as the really central way of interacting with information have carved out this space of interriority, of individuality. The place where you go, you and just that book, to sit for a while and think through and digest what's being presented to you. We are heading into an age – and I'm not knocking it in a luddite fashion as a lot of people do – we're heading into an age where that kind of reading is getting rarer and rarer

Google has done little to address the main concerns of privacy advocates.  Now they hope the judge in the upcoming fairness hearing on the settlement agreement will step in and force more protections onto the Internet Giant.
A spokesperson for Google made it clear that they could not arrange an interview for this story.

Rebecca Jeschke:

JESCHKE
Looking at something like Google Books its very clearly the way that reading is going, and thats good. That this sort of digital access to large amounts of information is exciting and one of these great developments in 21st centruy information gathering. We want to make sure that these privacy rights that have long been recognized in the physical world parlay into the digital world. That we don't loose these important privacy gains that we have as the technology changes. Jeschke says that Google has promised to follow all existing privacy laws but she says those laws need to be strengthened when it comes to protecting digital information.

I'm Eric Klein reporting - With funding from spot us.