Anonymity in a World of Digital Books: Google Books, Privacy, and the Freedom to Read

Abstract

With its Books project, Google has made an unprecedented effort to aggregate a comprehensive public‐access collection of the world's books. If successful, Google's collection would become the world's largest and most broadly accessible public book collection—indeed, project leaders have frequently spoken of their desire to create a “universal library” (Toobin 2007). Still, the Google “library” would differ from established contexts for the provision of free, public access to reading materials—like public libraries—along several policy‐related dimensions, of which perhaps the most glaring is its treatment of reader privacy. This paper teases out the specific differences in reader privacy protections between the American public library and Google Books, and what those differences might mean for the values and goals that such contexts have historically embodied. Our analysis is structured by Helen Nissenbaum's “contextual integrity decision heuristic” (2009), which focuses on revealing changes in informational norms and transmission principles between prevailing and novel settings and practices. Based on this analysis, we recommend a two‐pronged approach to alleviating the threats to reader privacy posed by Google Books: both data policy modifications within Google itself and inscription of privacy protections for online reading into federal or international law.

Archival Shadows in the Digital Age

“…Libby, "voluntarily divulges information when she decides to interact directly with librarians, booksellers and so on," while Netty is "compelled to allow Google to track and collect her information browsing and usage habits" under Google's privacy policy (Google 2014). A similar analysis have been carried out by Elizabeth A. Jones and Joseph W. Janes in their article "Anonymity in a World of Digital Books" (Jones and Janes 2010).…”

Short paper

“…Contextual integrity has been widely used to study privacy in various services [3,5,9,12,21] but ours is the first study to use contextual integrity for location-sharing and advertising, and the first to conduct a user study to collect empirical data on these services. Privacy concerns and behaviour in location-sharing services have been extensively researched, with user studies [1,17,24] evincing the social norms and practices that govern the expectations of users, and their motivations for using such services.…”

Editorial

“…The second article by Jones and Janes (2010) discusses the policy issues provoked by the success of Google books. The Google 'library' differs from established channels of public access to books along several dimensions, but particularly the treatment of reader privacy.…”