Google has introduced a new privacy policy for Google Books, to try and appease the critics of Google’s enormous book indexing project. The company has also been in communication with the Federal Trade Commission, and has discussed both the new policy and a letter to the FTC on the Google Public Policy Blog.
Google is still waiting approval from the court on its settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, so some services discussed in the privacy policy don’t even exist yet.
“Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product — and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy,” says Google Global Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath. “In this case, we’ve planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we’ve described some of those in the Google Books policy.”
The privacy policy can be read here. It contains sections on key provisions, practices specific to the current product, and practices specific to the proposed settlement. If you would like to read Google’s letter to the FTC, that also available on the FTC’s website (pdf).
Although, Google is still waiting on approval of the settlement, the company has still been busy making deals involving Google Books. Just this week, a partnership was announced with Interread, the British company that owns CoolerBooks.com. The deal will see Google providing a million public domain books to CoolerBooks.com. This is the first partner outside of the US to make such a deal with Google.
