Questions asked and answered. Written up for CNet News, reased early this morning PST:
Verbatim: Search firms surveyed on privacy
By Declan McCullagh and Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: February 3, 2006, 4:00 AM PST
Last modified: February 3, 2006, 8:43 AM PSTupdate To find out what kind of information the four major search companies retain about their users, CNET News.com surveyed America Online, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
We asked the same seven questions of each company. Their answers are reproduced below, with the responses sorted by the companies’ names in alphabetical order.
||Q&A||
Here are the questions as sent by Declan McCullagh over PolitechBot:
So we’ve been working on a survey of search engines, and what data they keep and don’t keep. We asked Google, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo the same questions:
- What information do you record about searches? Do you store IP addresses linked to search terms and types of searches (image vs. Web)?
- Given a list of search terms, can you produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or cookie value?
- Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of people? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
- Given an IP address or cookie value, can you produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?
- Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of search terms? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
- Do you ever purge these data, or set an expiration date of for instance 2 years or 5 years?
- Do you ever anticipate offering search engine users a way to delete that data?
[edit – above link]
And a FAQ and analysis of the shortcomings of the relevant federal privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034666.html
Read, take deep breaths, enjoy.