Daniel Brandt writes “As you have no doubt heard by now, five major libraries have agreed
to let Google digitize all or part of their collections. Google has
made arrangements with the New York Public Library and the
libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the
University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. Stanford and
Michigan will let Google digitize everything. New York and Harvard
agreed to pilot projects. Oxford agreed only to books and documents
prior to 1901.
Daniel Brandt writes “As you have no doubt heard by now, five major libraries have agreed
to let Google digitize all or part of their collections. Google has
made arrangements with the New York Public Library and the
libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the
University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. Stanford and
Michigan will let Google digitize everything. New York and Harvard
agreed to pilot projects. Oxford agreed only to books and documents
prior to 1901.
To address copyright issues, Google will divide material into three
categories: 1) public domain material that is displayed in its
entirety without ads, 2) copyrighted material that shows only
snippets and bibliographic information, and 3) copyrighted material
where the publisher has agreed to allow a portion to be displayed
by Google, along with sponsored links that return some money to the
publisher.
Nowhere in the press have any librarians or academics expressed
concerns about privacy issues. Google has the capacity, the
history, and the intention of tracking the browsing habits of
anyone and everyone who visits any of their sites. Since its
inception, Google has used a cookie with a unique ID in it that
expires in 2038. They record this ID, along with the IP address,
the search terms, and a time/date stamp, for everyone who searches
at Google. To make matters worse, Google never comments on their
relations with officials in the dozens of countries where they
operate.
Moreover, they can be very misleading about this tracking. When
Gmail was launched last April, a Google vice-president initially
claimed that there would be an information firewall between Gmail
and Google’s tracking on their main index search. Within three
months, however, after the press interest receded, Google revised
their main privacy policy to comply with a new California law.
In it they confessed that a single cookie is used across all of
their various services, and all information is shared between them.
( see http://www.google-watch.org/gcook.html )
I am asking the American Library Association to address the issue
of privacy in cases where search engine digitization projects
are proposed to libraries. Beth Givens from the Privacy Rights
Clearinghouse, Pam Dixon from the World Privacy Forum, and Chris
Hoofnagle from EPIC are helping me with this. Here is a letter
I wrote to Mitch Freedman: http://www.google-watch.org/appeal.html
If you can help us get the word out on this issue, it would be
much appreciated.
Thank you,
Daniel Brandt
PIR president
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Public Information Research, PO Box 680635, San Antonio TX 78268-0635
[email protected] Tel:210-509-3160 Fax:210-509-3161
www.google-watch.org www.cia-on-campus.org www.namebase.org
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