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Privacy Winning Search Engine War
amigoro writes "Privacy is emerging as the real winner of the Internet search engine war as companies aggressively compete with one another by offering stronger protections for user records, a report published today by the Center for Democracy and Technology concluded. The report notes that until recently, most of the major Internet search engines kept detailed and potentially personally identifiable records of their customers' searches indefinitely. But today the companies are trying to outdo each other in privacy protection by announcing steps to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted."
EVERYONE has something they've searched for that they don't want anyone finding out about and probably don't want advertisers knowing about especially. I mean really, anything from looking up diseases you might have to really obscure things or trying to find out information that "everyone" knows to something sexual to your purhcase histories to just about anything else. I can't think of any serious internet user who be okay with every search term they've ever typed seen by anyone else in the world at all.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
4. Your check is in the mail.
3. I won't come in your mouth
2. I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.
1. We'll delete your personal information.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Except that most of these companies are merely claiming to do so, we have no idea what is actually being kept either due to internal policy or some sort of government interaction. I would not put it past the current justice dept to force all these companies to publicly claim to have removed data while privately making it available to relevant 3 letter agencies.