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Big Four Search Engines Double As Big Brother

AOL's massive privacy leak begs the question: what do Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN know about you? The San Jose Mercury News scans the privacy policies of the big four, revealing "as much exposure as protection" for their respective users. All the information these companies collect comes from three main sources: IP address, registration and cookies. Information collected can and would be used against you if legal adversaries or government investigators needed it. However, the risk that an AOL-like data spill would happen again is small. Even so, the Silicon Valley paper had many questions, like: how long is the data kept? Could a person find out exactly what was stored about him or her? Could a person ask the company to delete that data? How often do law enforcement officials request that data? Could someone subpoena someone else's search data in a civil suit? Is this happening? To the first question, Google and Yahoo said data is kept "as long as it is useful.'' Microsoft and AOL said something similar, and most of the questions were avoided or not answered at all. None of the companies provided any insight into how often law enforcement officials and others are given user information. A log is taken any time your individual IP address interacts with a Web site--i.e. clicks on a video, enters a search query, plays a game. Cookies are attached to password-sensitive services like email or Yahoo's My Yahoo page; the Big Four knows who you are when your IP address changes. Registration data is collected when users register to use products and services, which makes us personally identifiable. Some experts say the information collected by these companies is "unprecedented and potentially dangerous" because it can be brought out in litigation. Most information captured is benign; as we know, the Big Four primarily collects it to provide a more targeted audience for advertisers, so they can charge more for it.

Read the whole story at San Jose Mercury News »

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