Search Engines Rush to Offer Privacy Features

By Greg McNevin

July 24, 2007: In the wake of Ask.com’s move to offer a search service that actually protects privacy, other major engines are now scrambling to offer their own brand of online privacy protection.

With mergers of online advertising companies and search providers, personal privacy is rapidly becoming somewhat of an online ethical football, with some companies feigning surprise that their users might not like having identifiable information about their online movements stored and only recently making any real moves to protect personal privacy now the cat is out of the bag.

Microsoft for one has gone down Google’s route and made data gleaned from searches anonymous after 18 months on its Live Search, but further to this the company claims it will be storing search data separately from data tied to people and remove identifiable data from cookies.

The company claims it will offering more advanced options for users to opt out of some information storing practices, it will be collecting less, and in an move that goes further beyond Google’s plan to cleanse search data every 18 moths Microsoft says its database cleansing will also be retroactive.

With Ask.com, Google and Microsoft all now offering varying levels of privacy protection, Yahoo has also stepped up and announced that it will be removing parts of stored IP addresses and other personal information stored in cookies within 13 months.

While any attempt to eradicate the eternal storage of personal information will no doubt be met with applause from privacy advocates, legally we’re in a bit of a grey area still with no specific laws requiring or forbidding the storage of identifiable search data. The debate is underway though, and with so many data security breaches making headlines recently personal privacy has never been more important online.

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