Friday, February 03, 2006

What search engines know, or may find out about us?

Today, CNET's staff did an outstanding job of finding out what major search companies retain about their users. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! respond on very well researched questions!

Whatever you do, just don't sacrifice innovation and trust in the current services for misjudged requests at the first place from my point of view.

At the bottom line, differentiate your Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches, consider visiting Root.net, and control your Clickstream. You can also go through Eric Goldman's comments on the issue and his open letter regarding Search Engines and China.

As a matter of fact, I have just came across a very disturbing fact that I compare with initiatives to mine blogs for marketing research, EPIC has the details on its front page. It was about time a private entity comes up with the idea given the potential and usability of the idea. Could such a concept spot, or actually seek for cyber dissidents in restrictive regimes with the idea to actually reach them, besides mining for extremists' data? I really hope so!
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