Buried in UC-Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson’s thorough evaluation of the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement is this inadvertent Onion headline: “Google’s senior management has actively been trying to expand the firm’s revenue models.” Should the settlement be approved, Google will still be allowed to “track reader’s past and present online actions and locations through some unstated combination of cookies, IP addresses, referrer logs, and numerous distinguishing characteristics of a reader’s hardware and software.” These practices, according to Samuelson, “would allow Google to know ‘what books are searched for, which are browsed (even if not purchased), what pages are viewed . . . and how much time is spent on each page.'”
Michael Chabon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jonathan Lethem oppose the settlement, fearing fewer people might browse, say, Tropic of Cancer if they knew that somewhere in a bunker somewhere somebody is keeping track of how long they are lingering over the naughtiest bits. Of course, lest one become too paranoid, we can be reassured that all this monitoring will not be conducted in the name of decently or patriotism but commerce.
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