From an Open Book Alliance Blog Post:
The Center for Democracy and Technology recently noted (and quite rightly, we might add), that although that Judge Chin rejected the flawed Google Books Settlement, there are still many outstanding concerns – reader privacy being an important one.
As CDT writes, Google
“is moving right along with its project to digitize and offer books licensed through its Partner program. [And] [l]imiting customer previews, facilitate lending among friends, and sync “bookmarks” across devices all require fine-grained tracking of not just what books a person buys or browses, but also what pages she’s read, what passages she’s highlighted, and with whom she’s shared which books. . . . Such a cache presents new opportunities for tracking and data mining, as well as a tempting honeypot for government or third-party litigants.”