Are big Search Engines finally concerned with privacy?

July 23rd, 2007 • privacy, search engines, web

Consumers and privacy groups have been talking about online privacy — or lack of it — for years now. Sites keep insane amounts of data on every user, registered or not, whether the end users know about it or not. We discussed this on Saturday at BR407 and it was quite illuminating. It’s even easy to explain especially when you put it in terms people understand the most: money. For example, everyone loves Amazon.com and it’s the largest online store in the world. Hell, I spend over $500 a year there. But have you ever wondered how they know what you want or would like just like you know? That comes from data mining. Amazon tracks everything you do on the site and I mean everything. They know what you’ve searched for, when you searched for it, what other products or searches match yours, if other customers bought the same item — and how many did! — or a similar item and the list goes on. Now, some of you even have the Amazon.com credit card to make your purchases even easier. Now guess what? They know your entire credit history and know everything about you, financially. What a great way to target markets and target you specifically. That’s not the greatest thing to realize is it? They know that you may have purchased some *ahem* adult toys in the past and well, they may even offer you discounts on any future purchases even though no one knows you bought said toys.

How does this example pertain to search engines? Amazon has its own search engine: A9.com. I hear good things about it however, I’ve never used it. I’m a die hard Google-fu master. Last week, Ask.com announced that they would now let users delete their entire search history that Ask.com has ever archived in the user’s account. That’s great for you Ask.com users — who are you, anyway? Now Google has stated they’ll bring their retention limit from 31 years in the future (2038, the end of the UNIX-based calendar) to 18 months. I’m glad that the last 7 years of data they have from me will be wiped clean in just 14 more months — their initiative began in March of this year. I guess that means my latest search trends will disappear next year surely to only be replaced by trends just as odd.

On Saturday, TechCrunch has reported that Microsoft and and Yahoo will be following suit, according to the WSJ. It’s odd to see both Microsoft and Yahoo trailing behind Ask.com in this initiative but it’s more interesting to see that big Microsoft is teaming up with little Ask.com to try and start a search engine industry-wide initiative to standardize privacy standards for everyone. If this goes over, it’ll mean all data is kept a uniform amount of time across platforms and when switching engines, you’ll be able to gauge when your identifiable data will be set free into digital oblivion.

I’ve spent the last 7 years of my life dealing with the fact that there’s absolutely no privacy on the Internet and it seems more and more people are starting to realize this as well. With this, it also means that end users are now ushering in some forms of online privacy forcefully on those who wholly thrive on data and its monetization. So perhaps by the time my kids are 25, there just may be privacy on our Internet.