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.