So we've been working on a survey of search engines, and what data they keep and don't keep. We asked Google, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo the same questions: - What information do you record about searches? Do you store IP addresses linked to search terms and types of searches (image vs. Web)? - Given a list of search terms, can you produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or cookie value? - Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of people? A prosecutor in a criminal case? - Given an IP address or cookie value, can you produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value? - Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of search terms? A prosecutor in a criminal case? - Do you ever purge these data, or set an expiration date of for instance 2 years or 5 years? - Do you ever anticipate offering search engine users a way to delete that data? Their verbatim responses are here: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034626.html And a FAQ and analysis of the shortcomings of the relevant federal privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is here: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034666.html -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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