DOJ Asks Google for Search Records
beSpacific and the Mad Librarian have some links to information about the Department of Justice’s request of Google’s records related to pornography in an attempt to learn more about minors’ access to pornography and Google’s hesitancy to release those records to the DOJ.
Addenda 1/21: The radio show Weekend America talks with Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor specializing in the Internet and self, about this issue. The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray explores the issue.
Now that those of us with Gmail accounts see our login name at the top of the Google search page, it seems almost obvious that Google has the ability to link our search data with our identities. Whether they actually do this or not is another issue; and, one I’m not going to explore (at least not right now). Libraries are legally or ethically not allowed to track and share certains kinds of user data. Is it fair for a search engine to track what we’re doing?
Google isn’t the only search engine with an e-mail service that does that. My identity shows up on Yahoo! when I’m logged into my Yahoo! account. It’s just not as obvious because it’s much lower on the page and there’s more clutter on the page.
In a crowded room at a talk the other week, a friend complained about how his e-mail address is blatantly displayed at the top of the search page. He doesn’t like the idea that anyone looking over his shoulder can see his e-mail address. Signing out of his e-mail account just to use Google many times a day seems silly. What’s the point of that, he wondered. What if someone borrows his computer and uses the search engine? Suddenly they know his e-mail address and that he’s logged into his Gmail account. Is there a preference these search engines can put in our accounts so that we don’t show up as being logged in when we use the search engine?
1/23: National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation is covering Google’s resistance to the subpeona. It airs at 2 pm EST on some NPR stations. Archived audio should be available on the site later this evening.
Neal Conan read a statement someone in Yahoo!’s public relations office e-mailed him. It explains the reasoning behind Yahoo!’s decision to turn their data over and that they don’t think of it as a privacy issue. I was unable to find the statement online after checking Yahoo’s press releases and doing some quick and dirty searching.
Ryan Singel of Wired News offers some tips and answers to those with questions and concerns about privacy while using search engines.
