EU Panel Pulls On Search Engines

Recently, Internet search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN were questioned over users’ privacy by an EU panel. These search engines monitor user behavior (search query history) for statistical analysis and further utilization in improving their algorithms.

The report from Article 29 of the Data Protection Working Party says that “search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for”. Hence, even if the data is collected through cookies, their lifetime shouldn’t be significant. Also, the data should be used for personalized adverts, only if the user has consented for the same.

These data fields are anonymised by Yahoo after 13 months, while Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months. However, do these search engines safely anonymise your personal data when it can reveal critical information such as your location or service provider? The possibility of this data of yours being misused does not go in your favour! Can you really be certain that the inferences of your search behavior and pattern are not sold off to any advertising major?

Popularly referred to as stalking, search engines normally track user’s search history by collecting their unique IP addresses an including a unique ID in cookies. Search engines collect information regarding search query patterns and results for billing the advertisers, through these very same cookies. Such comprehensive data with regard to different search patterns, queries, choice of results and user profile, which includes demographics, is like a haven for advertising firms to bombard users with their ads.

The data could possibly be compromised or exploited. Also, the main issue is user’s privacy, which must not be compromised under any cost, as per the EU panel. No matter who you are or where you are from, no one should be allowed to fiddle around with user’s privacy.