Catshanghai

I have just come across this article on the New York Times Reader about Google privacy issues that I blogged about on Sunday. Here is my response that was written using the reader’s annotation tool. It would be good if you could post annotations straight to blogs, but that feature is not yet supported.

Google Changes Policy on Search Records
By MIGUEL HELFT MAR. 14, 2007 - SAN FRANCISCO, March 14 — Web search companies collect records of the searches people conduct, a fact that has long sparked fears among privacy advocates and some Internet users that this valuable personal data could be misused.
Now Google is taking a step to ease those concerns. The company keeps logs of all searches, along with digital identifiers linking them to specific computers and Internet browsers. It said on Wednesday that it would start to make those logs anonymous after 18 to 24 months. Under current practices, the company keeps the logs indefinitely.

Excerpt from New York Times Article: Google Changes Policy on Search Records

Google’s ethical “Don’t Be Evil” mission statement suggests they do not intend to misuse all the information they are collecting about Internet users’ web searching habits. However, the fact that this data exists poses all sorts of privacy issues.

The US Government has tried and failed to subpoena search records as part of the Patriot Act, but who can say that Washington will not try again and succeed.

We trust Google’s security will prevent data being published accidentally, but it only takes one breach for all your data to go out in the wild.

Anonymity for legacy data is great, but it does not prevent other people from identifying you. Last year, AOL published its search records, witholding the identity of its customers. (See this article) It didn’t take long for the New York Times to uncover the identity of Thelma Arnold, a 62 year old woman from Georgia. (See this article).

Google provides a wonderful array of search, marketing and information services. They are a progressive and dynamic company with a brilliant team who are changing culture in unimaginable ways and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. This story raises a number of concerns about the privacy of our personal data. We can happily put confidential information about ourselves on the Internet knowing that there is some risk this could be seen by prying eyes or even used against us. As long as we know about these risks and take sensible safeguards then we shouldn’t let this sort of thing keep us awake at night.

Losing our privacy may be a price that we all have to pay for bringing all human knowledge together in a searchable format.