The price of looking good online varies widely. Reputation.com charges $120 to $600 a year for run-of-the-mill cases. “Celebrities, politicians and high-level executives aren’t so lucky,” Mr. Tom said. “Their programs typically average between $5,000 and $10,000 a month due to the higher level of finesse necessary and because the stakes are much higher.”

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial, technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved.

The idea of scanning every book ever published captivated Larry Page, co-founder of Google, even before he started the company. In 2002, he set out to refute skeptics, who said the idea was unworkable. He set up a makeshift scanning device at Google to see how many books could be scanned in an hour.

While e-mail addresses may not seem particularly vulnerable, experts say that if criminals can associate addresses with names and a business like a bank, they can devise highly customized attacks to trick people into disclosing more confidential information, a technique known as “spear phishing.”

Most people’s understanding of what can actually be done with the data provided by our mobile phones is theoretical; there were few real-world examples. That is why Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010

A federal judge rejected a Google settlement that would allow it to post millions of books online. It’s the latest blow in Google’s long effort to scan and make books available electronically. Amir Efrati explains the latest to Stacey Delo.