The most glaring omission is that Google has not specified a reasonable retention policy for the unique cookie ID and IP address data that it will collect from non-account holders who access Book Search. Sure, Google needs to prevent such users from reading too much of a copyrighted book, but its present cookie and IP address retention policies are a threat to users everywhere.

How about a seven-day retention policy for a special Google Books cookie and the associated IP address? No one will wait a week to read more pages from the same book. With short retention of this data, it will be closer to what libraries do — libraries normally delete the book data on borrowers when the book is returned. This would also help ensure that the data isn’t used by Google for behavioral ad targeting.

A seven-day retention policy would mean that if lawyers or judges come looking for data on reading habits, there is no data for them to find. It is not illegal in most civilized countries for libraries or search engines to fail to retain user data.

Google answered the FTC with what they do best, by saying nothing at all that’s even worth reading. By the way, there’s a reason why Amazon’s objection to the Settlement didn’t mention “privacy” anywhere. Amazon.com is just as guilty as Google when it comes to unreasonable retention for book access data. The FTC should come down hard on both of them.

Writers and publishers (including self-publishers) of “books” including out-of-print-books (and actually including many magazines, journals, chapbooks, ephemera, etc.), have until 4 September 2009 to decide what to do about a proposed settlement of m…