Privacy Winning Search Engine War

amigoro writes "Privacy is emerging as the real winner of the Internet search engine war as companies aggressively compete with one another by offering stronger protections for user records, a report published today by the Center for Democracy and Technology concluded. The report notes that until recently, most of the major Internet search engines kept detailed and potentially personally identifiable records of their customers' searches indefinitely. But today the companies are trying to outdo each other in privacy protection by announcing steps to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted."

you know this kind of reminds me of

[wamerocity]

that one episode of south park, 1104, The Snuke. While a hilarious episode, what was so funny was how everybody was able to do a background check on the terrorists by 'crosschecking' their myspace/youtube/jdate/personal blog/ebay/craigslist/google searches/realtor.com/etc etc accounts with each other. While it was a funny play on Web 2.0 it also shows just how much of our personal information is out there, and can be easily tracked down by just about anyone with a brain, some spare time, and an internet connection.

I sure as hell don't want ALL of my searches available to anyone...

Well, sort of...

[flaming error]

The report is actually here: [cdt.org]

It looks like the most privacy-friendly, hands-down, is ask.com with their opt-in "ask eraser". A distant second is aol.com. But both of them share their data with Google, which appears to have the worst policy.

Everybody seems to hang onto most everything for more than a year; better than forever I guess, but a pretty big window for, say, subpoenas.