Obfuscate and subvert

In a wonderful example of a company tricking people into giving up information about themselves, Google has added a "feature" to its Book Search function "allowing" users to tell Google all the books they own.

I refrain from writing paranoid little posts every time some company announces something like this, but in this case I want to point out that whenever the government tries to do this by force -- asking a library to turn over records of books its patrons have checked out, for example -- everyone is outraged. How much easier it would be if Mr. Citizen compiles the list himself and throws it out there on the web for everyone to view, or registers it with Google, Library Thing or another such service.

I don't mean to be paranoid. But in this culture where everything is thrown out onto the internet for public consumption by anybody -- people you would feel comfortable sharing personal details with, and (much more likely) people you wouldn't -- I get uneasy from time to time. Not that my own website isn't crammed with personal details.

What I would like is a subversive movement in which people register all sorts of completely random books with Google Book Search and make their database utterly useless. I doubt anyone would do that, although it would be nice if some hacker would write an automated program to do it.

technorati: Google, Book Search, privacy