… and might just tell Big Brother!
I have just finished an essay on the ethics of search engine behaviour and I wish I had finished reading this New York Times article about Google before I did so. Here’s the key bit:
Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw [search behaviour] data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.
So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?
“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin [Google’s co-founder] responded.”
(emphasis mine)
What on earth is Google doing keeping users’ IP addresses? I just checked and the fact they do this is in their privacy policy (when you can find it). They say, “Google may use your IP address or browser language to determine which language to use when showing search results or advertisements” but surely there are easier ways to get this information. Asking, for example?
blog.org keeps the IP addresses of all of its visitors, and especially all commenters. Do you have a privacy policy? Does tnir.org? (Does cfrq.net? 🙂
There’s not usually much interesting you can do with an IP address. They change far too often to identify an individual user, especially with dialup. With NATs and firewalls, a single address can represent 10s, 100s, or 1000s of users.
Incidentally, this is what makes tracking down spammers so difficult.
Comment by Harald Koch — 20 December 2002 @ 3:28 pm
Fortunately, nobody is likely to subpoena me to find out my readers’ behaviour. Google, on the other hand, is a big juicy target. And though an IP address by itself may be of limited utility, if you could legally target both Google and the ISP of your target user you might well be able to find out who was online and connected to Google at the time a particular search was made. And even if the results were approximate it might still be enough for a suspicious organization to put a “flag” on your name to track you further.
My privacy policy? I don’t usually have enough info to identify people individually from log files etc but if you say something interesting and leave enough information around that I can figure out how to contact you I may drop you a line. While anything you post here is public and I may pass it around or write about it, I will not share your email address (if I have it) with anyone without your permission and I won’t add you to any mailing lists (my own or other people’s) without your permission.
Comment by David Brake — 23 December 2002 @ 1:06 pm