Google Uni deal raises privacy fearA contract between Google and the University of Michigan released publicly on Friday contains no provisions for protecting the privacy of people who will eventually be able to search the school's vast library collection over the internet.
Google announced plans late last year to digitise and index as many as seven million volumes of material from the University of Michigan to make them searchable on the internet as part of its Google Print service, a searchable index of books. Google also has agreements with Harvard, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Stanford, where Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page began their search work before launching their company in 1998.
While the library projects have prompted copyright concerns from university groups and publishers, privacy issues are the latest wrinkle in Google's plans to expand the universe of web-searchable data. Daniel Brandt, founder of the Google-watch.org website, which is highly critical of the search company's policies, said: "I would have hoped that the University of Michigan would be sensitive to the fact that Google tracks everything that everyone searches."
