The Debate Over Search Engine Data Retention
Every time you use a search engine, data from your search is collected. It doesn’t matter if you’re logged in to any account or not — even if you’re using a public computer, the search engine compiles data from that IP address for future reference.
Why? The major search engines — Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft — claim that such data collection is necessary to maintain security while improving their basic services. (Google even has Youtube videos explaining why it collects such data as search queries, IP addresses and cookies.)
This practice has drawn fierce criticism. Advocates of online privacy demand that the companies limit the time that such information is kept by the companies.
The European Union is particularly concerned. “The European Commission’s Article 29 Working Party, an ominous-sounding advisory panel made up of data protection commissioners from each of its 27 member countries, leads the way in cracking down on the data retention limits, calling for search engines to delete search records after six months,” writes Google Watch’s Clint Boulton.
More from Clint Boulton’s article:
Yahoo today vowed to anonymize log data within 90 days for not only search, but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks, with certain exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo’s overture shaved 10 months off of its previous data erasure policy. …
To recap, Yahoo is quickest to nuke your data from its system at three months, Google at nine, Microsoft at 18.
The companies are scheduled to argue their cases for data retention before the European Commission panel in February. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo’s move to lead the way in shortening data retention time will motivate its competitors to do the same.
What do you think? Are you concerned about search engines retaining your data? Do you consider this an invasion of your privacy, or do you accept that it’s simply something search engines need to do to provide quality services?
If the manager of the local grocery store remembered that I’ve been in the store every Tuesday for the last six months and I usually buy the blueberry, not the strawberry poptarts, nobody would give it a second thought. We use Google’s service of our own free choice. It’s a store that they built with their own money, and they give their service to us for free. If they kept the data forever, they’d probably have a right to do so.