Calif. Initiative To Regulate Search Engines? 56
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 par
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"With all these damn laws being passed, it is lo
Head to Head (Score:1)
You can either keep the information on the grounds of security or you can remove them on the basis of privacy.
There is no middle ground.
If you are not a supermodel with stolen pictures then you are a terrorist.
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What I am sure of, is this. The government should not have the right to tell companies they need to save this data. That is absolutely wrong on a very basic and fundamental level.
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Can't I be both? [wikipedia.org]
The alternative (Score:1)
Ultimately, though, no one really cares about this type of issue because it doesn't hit home at all. Most people are still using ATMs and paying bills with checks. Technology is passing mos
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Lets get Ted Stevens on this... (Score:4, Funny)
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That's right, I said "internets" too.
I hope this doesn't go too far (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the government should only get involved if there is a problem that cannot be solved by the people themselves. Unfortunately, the willingness of companies to offer easily accessable avenues for finding some of the risks of their services is not as good as it should be.
I think the first step here is not to make hard rules as to how long all search info can be held, instead, they should give rules as to what can be held indefinately, and what cannot.
In this case, I don't think there is anything wrong with queries being kept indefinately, but it should not be kept in relation to people. Make it so that they have to encrypt IPs to some other value, so that searches can be tracked, and even what the users search, but there will be no way to tie that information to actual people.
That way the information can be stored indefinately, and in the event other people want to see, they will have nothing that they can use maliciously against other people. They will see search trends, and even see what individual users search for in order to create correlation between searches, but will not have access to anyones personal business.
It would be difficult to argue against this because any business that wants to know specific peoples searches is obviously using information that the users did not intend anyone to have.
By doing this the search companies would have a much more trusting user base.
If only we had a media that brought up important stuff like this, the companies would do it on their own in order to generate good PR and more traffic.
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Remember when AOL did exactly that and the humongous problems with it brought the issue to everyone's attention?
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(it took a while to get all the data correlated, but the main tables are all ready to go)
It is my firm belief that search engines should VOW not to keep search profiles on their users, nobody has yet seen an increase in quality from keeping person bound search records (even anonimized like aols were). Search records are 'radio active' in a sense because
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And honestly, how would you know if search companies don't actually take your search history into account. Quality is a very subjective measurement, and you don't actually know what's going on behind the scenes.
I honestly would not mind my search history made public. It's nothing interesting, I don't look up loli porn. And the most incriminating thing I have on it
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I hope this doesn't go too far (Score:5, Informative)
Tried to find out how to make TNT ? Off to Guantamo bay with you.
Finding out about the origins and local chapter of the KKK ? Better buy a new set of windows.
and so on.
Search queries are a private thing because like calling the help hot line for being suicidal if you can not guarantee privacy you end up causing real life damage.
Marketeers wet dreams and bottom lines only go so far, it's perfectly possible to run a search engine without profiling and still make a buck.
Maybe not quite as many bucks, and maybe you'd have to work a little harder to 'monetize' but to unconditionally hold hostage an individuals entire search history for an indefinite amount of time is a serious breach of privacy.
It would be like the phone company keeping a record of all your CONVERSATIONS, not just the numbers that you have dialled.
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Just like credit bureaus started out collecting stuff just for the heck of it they are now causing a very large problem for a very large portion of the population. Europe has much stricter privacy laws and as far as I know there is no way for your insurance company, your employer or anybody else f
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I feel my freedom of speech and information allows me to go out and read up on Nazi Germany if I want. It doesn't mean I'm going to go out and slaughter millions of Jews and try to invade Russia. I'm just interested in the war and I want to find out as much as I can about what happened. Now if this data is collected and I find that I have a police officer following me around town pulling me over every time I go 3 miles over the speed limit, or I go to
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You volunteer this information. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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To a certain extent.
My problem is this. It is not obvious to most users that this information is tracked to such a detailed degree. I spent four years in college for computer engineering, before that, I didn't know that entering text in a search engine was actually trackable to me. And I certainly didn't know that it was trackable, storeable, and searchable.
There is a reason people have their rights read to them when they are arrested. It is because not everyon
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Maybe we should make it so that it isn't. Right now, most web browsers broadcast an enormous amount of information, whenever they send a request. Do all websites we contact really need that information? Does it have to be broadcast in the clear? What if we made a browser that submitted only the minimum amount of information necessary to get a response back, used an overlay network to make different requests appear
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Their terms of service are clear and fairly concise:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/terms_of_service.htm l [google.com]
They attempt to explain how your interactions with their services seperately from their actual privacy policy. The privacy highlights document is somewhat shorter than the actual policy, but neither is terribly long, and both are clearly written:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html [google.com]
http://www.google.com/pri [google.com]
It's not written in stone (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't care whether or not my privacy is protected by Google. I do care that the government cares enough that they see fit to codify it in a way that isn't leaning towards the privacy side.
I would rather they ju
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Re:You volunteer this information. (Score:5, Informative)
Within the context of applicable laws. The laws we define.
You can apply your argument to pretty much everything - when you send a parcel via UPS, when you make a telephone call, when you give your details to a company to purchase something. Laws apply which protect us from misuse of our personal information.
If you choose to tell someone something voluntarily you cannot expect them to forget about it when you think they should.
Rubbish. An organisation can use your personal information within the bounds set by applicable laws.
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Since when did the government start legislating WHAT WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO, instead of what we ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO? The last time I checked, in a free society, we do whatever we want by default, unless the government explicitly and specificly bans a certain behavior.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting what you are saying (in which case I apologize), but it sounds like you are saying that an organization can only us
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Sure, and you can produce any speech you want, worship any religion you want, or peacably assembly to protest what you want... within the context of applicable laws. The point is that there (at least should be) limits to what laws control.
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I want to agree. I really do, but this isn't the 1800's. You can't just go off into the mountains to stay out of society's way. To live in this Brave New World you must---not can or ought, but must---participate in the global information infrastructure. In doing so, you will leave a trail. In other words, we've crafted a world wherein a person, to live as normal, must give up that privacy that was expectable in generations past. You must do these things to compete with
This may come as news to these folks, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This may come as news to these folks, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, right now:
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
Please contact contact-admin@google.com 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
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And even if the traffic passes through hops in CA, what can they do about it? Maybe force all local ISPs to block the search engine, but there's still 49 other states that will be unaffected.
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Public discussion? (Score:2)
But is it searchable?
M.
It would be interesting ... (Score:2)
Good job! (Score:2)
I want some answers too, but when it comes right down to it, can we really bully these private companies into giving out this kind of info?
Impress me (Score:2)
This is a knee-jerk reaction to an unfortunate incident- it's only a symptom of a much larger problem that lawmakers refuse to address...companies that make their living pimping and prostituting the personal information of American citizens. There is also the complete lack of a comprehensive law governing the handling of sensitive data, and that protects citizens from people that essentially profit from the increased risk they pose to the security other peoples' information.
But then, in order to really addr
Government Contradiction... (Score:2)
archive.org, is that a "search engine" (Score:1)
Dont use an SE without a proxy (Score:1)
unless you just crazy