Calif. Initiative To Regulate Search Engines?

Lauren Weinstein writes to tell us about CIFIP, the California Initiative For Internet Privacy — his attempt to get search engines off the dime on questions such as how long they retain search data. The initiative aims to explore "cooperative and/or legislative approaches to dealing with search engine and other Internet privacy issues, including a possible California initiative for the 2008 ballot." There is a public discussion list.

Sounds good in theory.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

But it's government, so to get anything done, anything enforceable would have to pretty much say, "You can only keep records for 25 years, and then you have to delete them. Seriously, guys, okay?" I'm not saying don't bother. Good on ya, California. But don't get yours hopes up.

You volunteer this information.

[onion2k]

While search firms have a legitimate business interest in using this data in reasonable ways for both ongoing business and R&D purposes, it is difficult for reasonable observers to justify the retention of this data on an indefinite basis.

The information that you submit to a search engine, such as your search terms, your IP address, your user agent string, any cookie information, is all submitted voluntarily. You give up this data willingly. If you want to keep any of this information private then don't submit it. Of course, that means you won't be able to use the search engine, that's the cost of privacy. A price you should be willing to pay if your privacy is genuinuely important to you.

Too many people seem to expect that they should be able to live a private life despite handing over vast swaths of data on a daily basis. You can't. If you want your data to be private you need to keep it to yourself. Data retention issues are only applicable in situations where you don't have a choice about relinguishing your information (eg tax returns, vehicle licensing, etc).

Bottom line: If you choose to tell someone something voluntarily you cannot expect them to forget about it when you think they should.

This may come as news to these folks, but...

[voice_of_all_reason]

If the search engine doesn't have an office in CA (and it'd be easy to move for stuff like this), they have no reason to listen to your silly laws.

Re:Sounds good in theory.

[jacquesm]

the government is at odds with itself over this, there is privacy protection and then there is the 'war on terror' bs that says that we will track everything everywhere all the time (carnivore and such).

I'm pretty sure that privacy protection (of which there is precious little in the US to begin with) is going to lose out on this one. The right thing for GOOG, AOL, MSN and so on to do would be of course to unilaterally stop keeping track of peoples searches in such a way that they can be attributed to a particular person.

Then the government would have to mandate that such queries be kept and we can all see the emperor again. As it is the big search companies do the governments bidding because their goals are fairly strongly aligned.

Keep everything -> more control over the population in terms of dollars spent or people on file.

kiss your privacy goodbye.

Re:This may come as news to these folks, but...

[jacquesm]

no, not really the traffic passes through points located in California.

Also, right now:

Registrant:
                Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
                Please contact [e-mail] 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
                Mountain View CA 94043
                US

they're pretty well represented there, and moving house is also not cheap (not to mention relocating all your employees) and all that just to avoid abiding by the law.

You might as well set up shop in Afghanistan if that's you attitude :)