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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.
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.
When you allow companies to save mass amounts of information, mass amounts of information, about the searches performed on the tubes, the tubes could get clogged with all this information. Therefore, instead of allowing this information to accumulate on the walls of the tubes, we are putting forth a mandate that all search engines clean their tubes on a yearly basis. To protect privacy. To protect the tubes. To save the internets!
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.
You take it, I don't want it...
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.
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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.