Search Engines Now Competing On Privacy Practices
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For a long time, search engines competed primarily on the strength of their results and how well they returned the pages people were looking for. Now, the issue is becoming much more complex. One of the major concerns for many search engines users is now privacy. There’s good news, according to one group.
According to CDT President Leslie Harris, this change of view “signals the emergence of a new competitive marketplace for privacy. By themselves, these recent changes represent only a small step toward providing users the full range of privacy protections they need and deserve, but if this competitive push continues it can only stand to benefit consumers.”
“It’s encouraging to see the nation’s largest Internet companies taking search privacy seriously. Now it’s time for Congress to do its part by passing a robust federal law that brings our consumer privacy protections up to the level that users expect”, added Ari Schwartz, CDT Deputy Director.
One of the supposed signals of the new ear is that Google will start auto-expiring cookies after two years, a voluntary move they announced on July 17th. Hopefully, the pressure will continue on these companies and even greater results can occur. I for one, value my privacy.
Are the search engines doing enough to protect privacy?
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2 Responses to “Search Engines Now Competing On Privacy Practices”
Cookies are so crucial to internet marketing optimization these days, as they allow for important gathering of statistics and personal customer information that can help personalize the users experience on some of their favorite consumer websites. But when it gets in the way of our day to day google searches and need to explore new websites without the fear of privacy breaches, cookies become a real problem. Simply disabling them doesn’t seem to be effective as they seem to be necessary at times for proper use of a site and yet many and most times when we’re browsing from site to site they become irritating and at times highly dangerous to the security of our personal information and our computer’s system integrity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked on a site that appeared to have some information I needed in its keyword or description results in Google and then when I got onto the site it was full of pop ups, cookies, and trojan viruses. I think what we need is cookie reform. Not to sound political, but we need to enhance a search engine’s ability to accept search types of cookies or cookies from certain high ranked sites (like a better business bureau type guarantee that the site isn’t going to damage you privacy or computer). I know the new Internet Explorer and Firefox do have some additional options that help with this but overall most users don’t know how to effectively play with their settings to get a desired result regarding the personal level of privacy they need. Maybe we need a tool bar that allows us to bookmark cookie safe pages or sites and disable others while we’re browsing or searching Google?
Hard to say.
By K Greenhaw on Aug 9, 2007
Interesting ideas for sure. I don’t think the average surfer has any idea how much info is really being stored in the way of cookies. Most is harmless, but I am concerned when they start to correlate data.
By Darren McLaughlin on Aug 10, 2007