Google is still waiting approval from the court on its settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, so some services discussed in the privacy policy don’t even exist yet.

"Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product — and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy," says Google Global Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath. "In this case, we’ve planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we’ve described some of those in the Google Books policy."

The privacy policy can be read here. It contains sections on key provisions, practices specific to the current product, and practices specific to the proposed settlement. If you would like to read Google’s letter to the FTC, that also available on the FTC’s website (pdf).

Although, Google is still waiting on approval of the settlement, the company has still been busy making deals involving Google Books. Just this week, a partnership was announced with Interread, the British company that owns CoolerBooks.com. The deal will see Google providing a million public domain books to CoolerBooks.com. This is the first partner outside of the US to make such a deal with Google.

UPDATE: A Google spokesperson provided this statement: “Google did not work with Jane Horvath on this issue while at the Department of Justice.”

When Horvath prepared to depart the confines of the government sector for the much greener pastures at Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation dropped a Freedom of Information Act request on the Justice Department. They wanted to see the communications that took place between Google and Horvath, now senior privacy counsel at Google.

Justice responded by not responding. Six months have passed without an answer from the Department. EFF filed a lawsuit asking the US District Court for Washington DC to prod an answer out of DoJ.

“We want to know what discussions DOJ’s top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company,” EFF senior counsel David Sobel said in a statement.

The Department of Justice, then under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, sued Google to release search records, in order to bolster the Department’s court case over the Constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act. Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies had already complied quietly with the Department’s demand.

Google stonewalled Justice, resulting in a lawsuit against Google that brought the whole issue of the Department’s information grab to public notice. At the time, Horvath, named the DoJ’s first Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer in February 2006, criticized the Department’s subpoena publicly.