• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 8, 2007

The influential advocacy group Center for Democracy & Technology is calling for new legislation to force search engines to protect users' privacy.

"Unfortunately, industry self-regulation by itself will never provide strong enough privacy safeguards," the CDT states in its new report, "Search Privacy Practices: A Work in Progress."

"Some search privacy issues may be addressed, but consumers' personal information will remain vulnerable in many other contexts," states the CDT. "In particular, whatever information is retained is available to the government under a mere subpoena, issued without a judge's approval. Companies will continue to face the intricacies and loopholes of our nation's patchwork of privacy laws so long as no federal standard exists."

The report comes at a time of mounting concern over the privacy of people's search history, both in the United States and in Europe. Here, the issue first attracted widespread notice last summer, after AOL publicly posted 20 million search queries of more than half a million members. The queries were tied to "anonymized" IP addresses, but that wasn't enough to protect the searchers' privacy because people often type their own names, addresses or other identifying information into the query box. The New York Times tracked down one such searcher within a few days of the story breaking.

In the last several months, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced new privacy initiatives, but even these aren't likely to fully protect people. Google, for instance, said it would slash the time it stored IP addresses to 18 months from 24 months -- though, of course, 18 months is still long enough to damage people's privacy.

Search engines typically say they need information that ties users to search histories to both improve the quality of results and to prevent click fraud -- for instance, to make sure that an advertiser isn't charged for incessant clicks from the same IP address.

The CDT responds by suggesting that companies develop other methods of achieving those goals. "Researchers, academics and Internet companies should continue to pursue new and innovative methods for... improving the quality of search results, preventing fraud and otherwise meeting business needs without tying searches to particular users," states the report.