Search history and privacy
Both Google and Ask announced their plans to improve privacy protection for the user. A search engine needs to identify and track the user for a variety of reasons, from being able to service search preferences like how many results should be returned on a page to returning contextual results through personalisation and detecting click fraud.
But, holding on to your search data and identifying you indefinitely through cookies and log files does bring up many privacy issues.
In January 2006 the US Department of Justice demanded that Google comply with a subpoena issued to turn over search data. Previously AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! had all handed over search data in compliance with the same request. Google stood firm and the case was dismissed.
This was a crucial victory for Google and any search engine who wants to provide a better search experience by learning more about the user through their search history. Most of us don’t mind a search engine holding some search history has long as we can know that data is secure.
So what’s changed?
Google will anonymise search server logs, IP addresses and Cookie IDs after 18 months. This will make it very difficult to trace a particular set of searches to a particular searcher. They will also set their Cookie to auto expire in 2 years.
Ask announced AskEraser, which will enable users to stop Ask retaining their search history.
I’m still not convinced if these measures really provide the level of privacy I’d want, but, they are going in the right direction. Personalised search can provide a much better relevance and context, and I’m all in favour of finding ways to secure privacy and allow these technologies to move forward.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment