After a week where Ask launched AskEraser, a product that allows users to erase their search history, and Google announced a reduction in retained data time from 2038 to 18 months, more privacy initiatives are on their way.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will officially announce Monday “new policies and technologies to protect the privacy of users of its Live Search services” and Yahoo will announce plans for “a policy to make all of a user’s search data anonymous within 13 months of receiving it.”
The same report goes on to detail plans by Microsoft and Ask to start an “industrywide initiative” to establish standard practices for retaining users’ search histories.
The 4 major search engines with major privacy initiatives in the space of a week and attempts to establish industry wide practices. Privacy would appear to be the new black. But why, and why now?
The Wall Street Journal correctly notes that in part, growing concerns among consumers and privacy groups is driving the move towards improved user privacy. It then goes on to cynically suggest that with Microsoft and Ask it may be a case of the search minnows trying to find a marketing edge over the much larger Google and Yahoo.
A stronger reason lies with Government pressure. In Europe, Google is currently being probed by an Independent EU panel that is investigating possible breaches of EU Privacy Laws. Although the probe is currently focusing on Google, it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make that it could easily be extended to other search companies. The FTC probe into Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick may also consider privacy issues relating to the acquisition along with anti-trust considerations.
No matter the reasons, the steps towards improving user privacy are welcomed. Expect to hear a whole lot more about privacy in the coming weeks and months.
Update: Microsoft has released details of its privacy changes here and its corporate initiative with Ask here.
(image credit: NewSchool)
If they could find a way to get good random-sample metrics occasionally, I think ‘protecting privacy’ could save a lot of money, legal resources, and server space, too. Win-win-win.
The only concerns are if their Advertisers will still get equally targeted results - the only reason for the personalized information was to gain an edge on the competition by demonstrating to Advertisers that the results would be more targeted to their demographics.
Google is moving towards customizing search specifically for the individual ie. a search on “tech gadgets” should give different results for you and me based on our past search history. The more data they keep helps their cause. Random-sample metrics would not cut it in this case.
What I would like to see is an opt-out option like AskEraser for Google. If you’re a privacy nut and would not like to keep any search history, you have the choice to erase all history. If not, all power to you if google can tailor their results to your taste.
It would be great if they start competing on privacy. Google is about the worst. It would be far better if they stored no search history. At least they should reduce the time they store any search to 30 days.
Governments are starting to subpoena people’s search histories, even those these should be treated as “private effects”.
Interesting stuff!
People are going to keep demanding increased personalization– Google can’t get smarter about serving up great results tailored just for you without knowing anything about you.
I also find it interesting that no one mentions the fact that a big pile of us trust hundreds of megabytes of private email to services like Gmail/hotmail/yahoo. I could probably do a lot more damage with someone’s inbox than I could with their search history.
On a lighter note - I like your image credit and your photoshop skills
most people don’t really care about their privacy…how many here actually read a privacy statement? And this is a tech crowd thats aware of that stuff…for 99.99% of the population, they could care less about it.
I agree with Tony Wright - there are so many other places that we input our information…Think about all those hackers out there. MySpace comes to mind! Google is the least of my worries at this point.
AD
When using non-stock images I always like to credit, it’s only fair.
2 seconds flat: “privacy” in Google Image Search then a rather poor color over the bits I didn’t like, but thanks anyway
On a personal level, I’m not really concerned with companies like Google tracking my search term info, I have nothing to hide and could really care less. And free email services such as Yahoo/Hotmail…they’re free, so you get what you pay for. What bugs me more is when entities can track what users exchange with each other, I predict that encrypting data (for both file exchanges and email) is going to become the next big thing in consumer privacy.
Duncan - out of curiosity, I thought images were protected by default? You also edited the image. Isn’t this the same issue that podtech and lan (forgot last name) are having?
scroogle scraper= done
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s still not enough for me. 13 months is a long time, especially on the internet, and it equates to a lot of personal data.
I’m certainly not paranoid about it (I still use google, gmail, etc.) but having search terms and web history in a database somewhere makes me cringe. One subpoena and all of that information is in official hands.
Currently you can opt out of the google web history (https://www.google.com/accounts/EditServices), but there should be ways to opt out of the other data collection too.
I think you should read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemarketing
Definitely a concern with so many of us on so many sites………
privacy, thats rich coming from the web2 dolts who rush to post all the details of their lives into any empty text form they find
Huh? The databases have already been created. The horse is out of the barn.
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/.....A1A32557E/
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/.....AA9877B28/
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/.....8C864EA52/
Microsoft also got together with Ask.com today and “announced” that they’re calling for more privacy standards/policies from the industry…they’re supposed to get back to us with an update in September.
Do not associate a user’s IP address with its searches. Offer relevant results through syntactic and semantic analysis of the search terms. Period.
Generate revenue/profits through other sources.
RAUL
http://www.tengee.com
Duncan,
You might want to take a quick read of MS patents 0157227 & 0156522 - Advertising Services Architecture and Social Context Monitor. There’s a lot more information about to pass over the web.
Cheers,
Peter
I have had the feeling for months that Google was creeping towrads the “evil-empire” status that Microsoft once held. EU investigations and pending anti-trust suits sure make things look like Google in headed in the wrong direction. I guess that whole “don’t be evil” thing was fine when they were a start-up, but when you run a multi billion dollar a year operation “evil” picks up “in the eye of the beholder” status.
I think this is a good step.
Google could care less about anyone’s privacy. All they’re worried about is how to monetize the information. I used GMail til I stared noticing spam with reference to subject matter of emails I sent, and/or received. DO NO EVIL?
Think they inhaled?
I’m not particularly interested in this whole new focus on privacy. I don’t mind sharing my information with companies I relatively trust, and I generally don’t feel my search queries contain anything to be ashamed of (though some might seem anomalous).
salut cava
touts