[Infowarrior] - Fears mount over internet privacy

[Richard Forno]

December 16, 2007
Fears mount over internet privacy
Google rival Ask.com is promising to wipe out people¹s search records within
hours. But do the data really disappear?
Dominic Rushe, New York

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/a
rticle3055825.ece

FOR the past three years Daniel Brandt has been running his own search
engine. He called it, cheekily enough, Scroogle.

Scroogle.org is the antiGoogle. It carries no advertisements and survives on
donations from its users, usually less than $20 (£9.90) apiece when and if
they make them. It doesn¹t even have its own technology and relies instead
on ³scraping² search results from Google¹s site and offering them up, minus
the ads. Traffic has doubled every year and now Scroogle has passed 100,000
visitors a day.

Brandt said growth was down to one word: privacy. Unlike its well-funded
rivals, Scroogle keeps no record of who is using its site or what they are
looking for. Within an hour of using the site, the search terms are gone for
good.

The internet has become a depository for our most private thoughts and
information. Details we would be reluctant to share with a doctor are
routinely volunteered to Google, Yahoo and other search engines, and can
easily be traced back to the computer it came from.

³A lot of people don¹t realise search engines save everything you search
for,² said Brandt, a longtime Google critic. ³The more these issues get into
the press, the more people realise that when they sit down at their
keyboard, they¹re being watched,² he said. But after a series of scandals,
that laissez-faire attitude seems to be coming to an end.

All the big search groups have been tightening up privacy policies. Last
week the search engine Ask.com went furthest by offering a new service, Ask
Eraser, that will wipe out a searcher¹s queries within hours.

Search information is valuable, allowing firms neatly to target ads to a
person¹s interests to generate billions in advertising revenue. Search logs
also improve the engine¹s performance, companies argue. Google uses
search-log data to run its spellchecker ­ the system that asks: ³Did you
mean: Arnold Schwarzenegger?² when you type in his name spelt wrongly.
Search data are also used to detect and fight spam and other attempts at
internet fraud.

Google, the industry leader, stores personal information for 18 months, as
does Microsoft¹s search engine. Yahoo and Time Warner¹s AOL retain search
requests for 13 months. But they are not the only people after the
information. Search records have increasingly been targeted by the police.
Last month in North Carolina a court denied Robert Petrick a retrial after
he was convicted of murdering his wife. Google was one of the strongest
witnesses against him. His wife, cellist Janine Sutphen, went missing in
2003. When police became suspicious they raided Petrick¹s home and found the
computer consultant had Googled the words ³neck², ³snap², ³break² and ³hold²
before his wife was killed. The prosecution argued Petrick had also viewed a
document entitled 22 Ways to Kill a Man With Your Bare Hands and researched
body decomposition and the topography of the lake where his wife¹s body was
later found.

Few people would complain about internet searches being used to catch
criminals, but divorce lawyers regularly subpoena search-engine firms
looking for dirt on warring spouses. Highly personal information can be used
in a variety of ways that were never sanctioned by the person who entered
the search terms. Then there are the risks of accidental breaches. Last year
AOL inadvertently released detailed queries conducted by more than 650,000
Americans. Searches released by AOL included ³depression and medical leave²,
³fear that spouse is contemplating cheating² and ³how to kill oneself by
natural gas². Searchers were quickly able to identify some of those behind
the queries. While AOL is the only firm to have suffered a major leak so
far, critics say that more are bound to come, and internet users should be
wary of how firms can legitimately use their personal information.

The London-based watchdog Privacy International ranked Google as ³hostile to
privacy² in its survey of internet firms, its lowest rating. Rivals Yahoo
and Microsoft also fared poorly.

In recent months, Ask.com has been trying to seize the high ground on search
by casting itself as the alternative to Google¹s ³monopoly² and by
emphasising privacy. A spokesman said: ³Some people are willing to lessen
their concerns about privacy to get more services, but, for a certain set of
people, privacy reigns supreme.²

It is difficult to erase digital footprints, however, and the information
typed by users of Ask Eraser will not disappear completely. Ask.com relies
on Google to deliver many of the ads that appear next to its search results,
so Ask.com will continue to pass some query information to Google.

³One less place for data to be breached is a good thing,² said the Ask.com
spokesman. Others are less impressed. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of
Search Engine Land, a blog that covers search engines and marketing, said
more privacy moves were likely but that increasing privacy on the web was no
simple matter.

³All the major search engines have moved to toughen up their stance on
privacy this year. I think it¹s useful, but the changes they are making
gloss over the more detailed logging that goes on when people use these
services,² he said.

Google will anonymise data after 18 months, so that any searches done, say,
19 months earlier, would not be traceable back to a person¹s computer. But
when people log on to one of Google¹s services, Gmail, for example, and use
the web history feature, which records and saves searches, Google is keeping
track of all the websites they visit and all their searches ³and they are
going to keep that for ever², Sullivan said. Data are linked far more
closely to you personally and you don¹t have any control over it.

What happens next may well depend on investigations under way into Google¹s
privacy policies. In Europe and the US it is under pressure from politicians
over its purchase of online ad firm Double Click, the largest digital-ad
server with a huge data-base of consumer searches. Between them, Double
Click and Google know an awful lot about how people behave on the web.

In the meantime, for those concerned about their privacy, there¹s always
Scroogle. ³Until we get too popular,² said Brandt. ³Then I¹m expecting
Google will pull our plug.²