Google's Privacy Blues

For years, consumers and privacy advocates have worried about what Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are doing with the search data they collect from people using their respective search engines. Since all three companies used to retain the data for 18 months, data servers all over the country were keeping tabs on what you search for and analyzing the information to refine their search functions. (And, privacy advocates worried, keeping a storehouse of sensitive information on hand, which could be a treasure trove for criminal investigators or marketing researchers to sift through.) Now, it seems, Yahoo may see this fear as a potential angle in its never-ending war to halt Google's search dominance. Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it would only keep such information on hand for 90 days, after which it would scrub the data of any information that could identify who searched for what on its service. From now on, your search for pot brownie recipes will disappear after three months, provided you use Yahoo to look for them.

This move comes on the heels of increased efforts by the European Union and members of Congress to force search companies to limit the time they hold onto such data. Google had already cut the time it retains personal search information to nine months. But Yahoo's announcement set a new standard, going beyond the European Union's proposed limit of six months. The company's executives may have seen this as an edge in their fight against Google; in a recent survey by the information security research companies Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, Google finally dropped out of its list of the top 20 companies consumers most trust on issues of privacy.

According to InformationWeek's Thomas Clayburn, Google may have left itself vulnerable to such moves by a remarkably cavalier attitude toward people's privacy in general. The photographs in Google Maps' street view peer into people's backyards or capture folks in less-than-dignified moments, but Google doesn't particularly care. Google did itself no favors when it refused calls to place a link to its privacy policy on its home page, citing the aesthetics and quick loading speed of having mostly white space on the page. But now that Microsoft has offered to scrub personal data after six months and Yahoo has raised the bar to three, Google's growing reputation as the company that doesn't really care about invading your privacy may bite it in the ass.

"The more Google knows about you, the more relevant its search results will be and the better it will be able to target ads to your interests," Clayburn writes in a nicely cogent piece. "Some Google users appreciate that intimacy. Some don't care. And some find it creepy and don't want to have that kind of relationship with an online company. If Google fails to understand that and to accommodate privacy concerns more flexibly, it risks losing its dominance to a search company willing to offers users more control over the data they own and the data they generate. Don't count Microsoft or Yahoo out just yet. The more willing they are to cater to user privacy concerns, the more Google will look like a stalker."