'm as big a fan of government intrusion as the next person, but things may have gotten a little out of hand lately. Take last week's legal contretemps between the Justice Department and Google. Forget for a minute that Google really faces no downside by refusing the government's request to turn over search data. Even if Google loses the case and has to turn over some (truncated) amount of (very general) information about a (random) selection of searches, it still wins in the court of public opinion as a defender of personal privacy. As my colleague Chris Murphy put it, Google should take the court costs out of its marketing budget. . Why should the federal government demand that search providers turn over their hard-earned data? Finders keepers, after all. Besides, search data is meaningless without context. Just because a man was convicted recently of killing his wife based partly on evidence of Internet searches for terms like "neck," "snap," and "break," what does that prove? That he was a do-it-yourself-Thanksgiving guy, as much as anything else, if you ask me. The link for this article located at InformationWeek is no longer available. . Why should the federal government demand that search providers turn over their hard-earned data? Fin. government, intrusion, person, things, gotten, little. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
We asked the same seven questions of each company. Their answers are reproduced below, with the responses sorted by the companies' names in alphabetical order. What information do you record about searches? Do you store IP addresses linked to search terms and types of searches (image vs. Web)? Weinstein: Any time a search is done on the AOL service or AOL.com, the left rail on the results page offers a list of the most recent searches conducted by that user. . . Feedback from corporations regarding the gathering of search data and privacy issues underscore their handling of user information.. Search Data Collection, Privacy Practices, User Information. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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