Having thought about it some more, Google is in deep and immediate trouble. They need to act swiftly (in days) and decisively to get on top of this before public perception gets out of hand.

Simply put, Google can NOT afford to have public opinion turn against their opt-out model. Their whole vision depends on opt-out.

But think about what a week or two of stories like this will do. Opt-out will become synonymous with evil. Then how dows Google Book's stance to authors look? How do all their other auto-data collection techniques look?

Google depends on opt-out to their very core, down to robots.txt.

They can't afford public opinion to turn against that, and it's going to if they don't move fast.