Privacy Initiatives Sincere Or Marketing Ploy?

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Yesterday San Jose Mercury News printed a story about how Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask are going to "limit" the personally identifiable information (PII) they collect online.

It's rather sad that what they view as improved privacy practices still have a very long way to go. Why is storing search query information for any period beyond the time of the actual query necessary? It *should* only be stored on the site user's own computer at their discretion. Yes, yes...I know *WHY* the search giants are saving the query information, and all under the guise of improved customer experience.

One action that sounds interesting is Ask.com's new "AskEraser" feature "available by the end of the year. Reportedly by activating this feature Ask.com will not store any query information at the instigation of the enduser. This will be really fun to test once the feature is available...if it ever appears.

"Microsoft said it would also join the Network Advertising Initiative."

Find out more about the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) here.

The list of organizations that comply with the NAI is currently quite small. Wonder if Microsoft joining the initiative will boost the numbers of organizations participating?

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

Comments

I have decided to change my primary search engine to Ask.com because of this. At least they are going to offer an option. Google feels that they can do what they want, when they want, as they want and are getting a little too big for their britches.

Posted by: Andy ITGuy | July 24, 2007 10:01 PM

It's funny, my oldest son has been using computers quite happily since around age 2. I allowed him to start using the Internet at around 8 years old (he's now 10), and I showed him the different search engines. Back then he quickly chose Ask.com over Google. When I asked him why he said, "I'm not sure, it just seems better."

I agree, it is really amazing how far into so many other business ventures and industries Google's roots have spread. Their bed certainly seems to be very large.

Posted by: Rebecca | July 25, 2007 8:49 AM

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