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.

Comments

I hope this doesn't go too far

[walnutmon]

Basically the most dangerous part of keeping this data is the fact that other people can match you to your queries.

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.

Re:I hope this doesn't go too far

[1134]

Looks like California is getting uppity... trying to regulate the world. Sometime I'd like to see someone like google just say "Fine, we are boycotting your state." I am not specifically complaining about Calf, but the general principle of someone thinking they are big enough to extort others into doing what they mandate. It would be nice to see someone give these these bullies the proverbial finger.

Re:You volunteer this information.

[walnutmon]

You give up this data willingly.

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 everyone knows the law and when something really important to someone is at stake, the government believes that the less educated still deserve to know how certain things will affect them...

This leads to a dispute over what should people know on their own, and what should people be told before using. Google has an EUA, but you don't need to read it, or even look at it to use their service. Maybe you should (oh yeah, and maybe it should be readable by normal people, not just lawyers).

I know there is sentiment to say "fuck people who use stuff they don't understand". I think that people need to be more responsible for themselves. But in the case of the internet it is a great tool for everyone, and I think the more people use it, the better. Something as basic to anyone who needs information as a search engine should have the risks better explained on a regular basis.

It's not written in stone

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Though you may hand over this information, there's nothing forcing the government to force search engine companies hold on to the data. If the search engine decides it doesn't want to hold on to all these search stats, they can't do anything about it if their hands are tied by government regulation.

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 just left it alone and went on their way.

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

[IO ERROR]

Mod parent up... I love these CIFIP guys. They basically are saying: "We want you to run your business OUR way, and if you don't, we'll get the guys with guns (the state) to MAKE you run your business OUR way." They act as if they didn't have a CHOICE or the ABILITY to protect their own privacy, both of which they do in abundance. Maybe this will finally wake up Silicon Valley and they'll finally get the hell out of the People's Communist Democratic Republic of Kalifornia. There are much better places, even in the U.S., for the tech industry to be located.