companies - not to mention governments - of what we read, Jo Glanville request

Whenever you read a newspaper on the computer or buy an ebook, you can leave an electronic trail behind you. This route is potentially lucrative for businesses, and is a new source for monitoring the implementation by the government and the law.

retailers and search engines, including Google, Amazon, and you can get a surprisingly detailed portrait habits of reading books: what we buy, what we sail, the amount of time spent on a page and even make annotations in an eBook. As activists joked, the equivalent of a library to hire someone to follow in the store to look at each collection book, then sitting at home with you while you read what you have purchased.

The freedom to read is not just about the fight against censorship in the circumstances obscenity, libel or defamation. Since the digital revolution is increasingly the protection of the freedom of the reader as well as reading material.

Last year, California passed a law protecting the privacy of readers: firstly, the vulnerability of readers in the digital age would be recognized in the constitution. The reader of privacy means that government agencies must obtain a warrant before accessing customer data in bookstores or online booksellers. Civil liberties and digital rights groups are hopeful that other states adopt legislation. The EU has also approved a bill making it more difficult for the sites to follow our online activities without our consent.

At a time when our lives are lived in public, more than ever, the loss of privacy may be a price some are willing to pay to be part of the digital future. But fundamentally eroding privacy to enjoy our freedoms - including freedom of thought and expression. Why should companies - not to mention governments - what you read? The government's interest in literary taste always increases when national security is at stake in a notorious case in 2008, a student at the University of Nottingham was detained for seven days by police after downloading the training manual for Al Qaeda on the website of the U.S. Government for his PhD in the fight against terrorism.

Awareness of the problem is increasingly catastrophic since the launch of its Google Buzz social network in 2010, he shared users contacts without their permission, the revelation last year that Facebook is followed Users browsing information after the session was over. In February 2012, the Obama administration announced that it would push for all browsers to include a "do not track" on the part of a Privacy Bill of Consumer Rights. In May, a class action was filed against Facebook to collect data on Internet use of its members.

In the UK, there is no alarm bill on government data communications, which will give the Minister of the Interior the power to require a wider range service providers to store data for up to one year. The police may request such information without a court order "authorized purposes", from crime detection to public safety.

CS Lewis commented: "We read to know we are not alone", but sometimes that's exactly what we hope to be. Monitoring the new possibilities compromising privacy fundamental act of reading. If readers, lawyers and civil liberties groups were combined to assert the rights of each of us to read, then this would be a force for change.

Lewis

Facebook

Google

ACLU

California

Amazon