BusinessWeek has an interesting story about a man who wants a digital log of his entire life.

For the past 10 years, [Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old legend of computer science], a senior researcher at Microsoft, has been leading the life of a digital pack rat. He has been recording the twists and turns of his existence and storing all this information in vast digital files. Bell takes pictures and records his phone conversations. He maps the path of his footsteps and scans every shred of paper worth saving. All this effort is to build an electronic memory, a digital adjunct to the faulty and often delusional one between our ears. In an engaging new book, Total Recall, which Bell wrote with colleague Jim Gemmell, he argues that growing numbers of us—strange though it may sound—will soon be following his lead. Read more »

NPR has an interview with Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” and an excerpt from the book. Mayer-Schonberger says that allowing data to be forgotten can provide privacy protection for individuals. NPR writes:

Evolving digital technology has provided a steady aid for people in their quest to remember virtually everything. Social networking sites remind you of friends’ birthdays, digital calendars send you reminders, and photos posted online preserve memories indefinitely.

But Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, argues that now is the time to reintroduce our ability to forget. The indelible digital memory can be as unforgiving as it is helpful. Mayer-Shonberger suggests an expiration date for information. Read more »

Two librarians wrote an editorial for the San Jose Mercury News discussing privacy and the proposed Google book deal.

It’s good news that the U.S. District Court decided to hold off on finalizing the settlement among authors, publishers and Google Book Search, the search engine’s gigantic new online library that scanned 7 million books from major American research libraries. While the concerns of protecting intellectual property rights are getting most of the attention, there are still too many questions about public fair use and privacy that remain unresolved. [...]

The problem with the initial proposed settlement is a lack of specificity about how public libraries throughout the United States would be able to provide access to Google Book Search for millions of citizens. [...] Read more »

The Sunday Telegraph reports that several councils in Australia want to add radio frequency identification (RFID) technology (which transmits data wirelessly from a chip or tag to a reader) to library books, CDs and DVDs in order to deter thieves.

The microchips, which are designed to prevent theft and improve stock management, are set to revolutionise library operations.

Instead of polite letters requesting the return of overdue books, the chip will lead council staff straight to the borrowed items. Read more »

CNet reports on a letter from (pdf) the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Samuelson Law Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law to Google concerning privacy in its Book Search service. The groups said:

Under its current design, Google Book Search keeps track of what books readers search for and browse, what books they read, and even what they “write” down in the margins. Given the long and troubling history of government and third party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search. Without these, Google Books could become a one-stop shop for government and civil litigant fishing expeditions into the private lives of Americans. Read more »

The New York Times reports that, “In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of [two books by George Orwell] from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.” Amazon deleted the books because the books were added to the Kindle store by a company without rights to the works.

And this is not the first time Amazon has done this. “Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand.” After the Orwell fiasco, however, the company has said it is changing its system “so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

The irony of Amazon’s actions is that one of the books, “1984,” is about a dystopian society where “Big Brother” watches over every individual every second of every day. Conformity is not just a way of life, but it is how you stay alive.

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.” Read more »