About privacy on Google Play Books

January 23rd, 2018 | View archived version

The main Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including Google Play. Below, we describe privacy practices specific to books on Google Play. Note that “books” in this policy refers to ebooks on Google Play and does not include audiobooks or other formats.

Practices specific to Google Play Books

The privacy practices that are specific to books on Google Play are:

• To fulfill contractual commitments to rightsholders who license us books, we enforce certain security limits (for example, to prevent abusive sharing of purchased books and to enforce page view limits on some book previews), and we also enforce limits on the numbers of browsers or devices that can access an account during a given period of time. In order to enforce limits on numbers of devices, we will store the unique ID numbers of your devices on our servers. You can delete a device ID number when you wish to stop using that device.
• You will need to have a Google Account in order to purchase books because account information is necessary to provide access to users who bought the book. We limit the information (such as books titles) we provide to credit card companies, and enable you to delete purchased books from your Google Account. However, you will not be able to delete the record of your purchase transaction (including the title of the book) from your Google Payments account history.
• If you are part of a family group on Google Play and purchase books using a family payment method, your family manager will be responsible for these purchases and will therefore see a record of your books purchases made using the family payment method, including titles and genres. Although you will be able to delete purchased books from your Google Account, you will not be able to delete the family manager's records of the purchase transactions.
• In order to enable consistent reading position across devices and provide useful navigation within a book, we store the last five pages (only) in each book a user has viewed with the user's account. We also store pages viewed for security monitoring and/or if the user elects to use the Web History service.
• Special legal privacy protections for users may apply in cases where law enforcement or civil litigants ask Google for information about what books an individual user has looked at. Some jurisdictions have special "books laws" saying that this information is not available unless the person asking for it meets a special, high standard such as proving to a court that there is a compelling need for the information, and that this need outweighs the reader's interest in reading anonymously under the United States First Amendment or other applicable laws. Where these "books laws" exist and apply to books on Google Play, we will raise them. We will also continue our strong history of fighting for high standards to protect users, regardless of whether a particular "books law" applies. In addition, we are committed to notifying the affected user if we receive such a request that may lead to disclosure of their information; if we are permitted to do so by law and if we have an effective way to contact the user, we will seek to do so in time for the user to challenge the request.

For additional information about books on Google Play and privacy, please see our FAQ.