Pete Dudchenko

Here’s a billiant idea from fredshouse.net but doubtful to ever be realized. I think it goes against Google’s revenue plan. How can they continue to make money charging for personalized search ads if people strip out off of their personalization data?

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

Link to the site

Confused on the point? Every time you perform a search with a search engine you’re trusting a couple of companies with your data. First, the Search Engine, since they know what keyword you searched on, and what links you clicked on in the results. Your ISP also knows what pages you’ve visited. These are things that most people probably never concern themselves with because they assume that even though these things may be tracked, no one is concerned with tying these back to an individual person. Sure a Search Engine many be concerned with information in aggregate to help sell adds and present relevant data to advertisers but they aren’t concerned with doing this at an individual basis. Most search engines won’t even store a name with the searches, they use random numbers instead to keep people’s information private.

Think for a second about the AOL data scare that occurred a little while back. Basically a bunch of aggregated data was released accidentally into public access. Even though no names were tied to the searches that were perfomred, it was possible for people to look at the keywords used for searches and figure out who some people were, where they lived, and even contact them.

Search Engine’s go through a lot of effort to keep your data secure and private but as you can see that’s not a guarantee that you’re 100% safe. Mistakes can be made and the propsed idea above is giving control of your data back to you. If you want to “clear your data” from a search engine, GDP might let you.

So why won’t it happen? Because even though Search Engine’s aren’t necessarily interested in your data individually, it is valuable to them in aggregate. That’s how they make money and measure results. Its how’s they can determine what pages are most relevant to a search term. Its also how they can communicate to advertisers on where trends are. Removing that, hurts their business. And I’m sure an agument could be made that it hurts you as well. If I can’t track your searches, I can’t estimate what results are going to be most relevant to you (see Google’s Personalized Search Feature).

Still, it does raise some interesting questions though. Who should ultimately “own” your data? And how comfortable are you with someone else managing it?

Posted by Pete on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 5:35 pm.