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? Their verbatim responses are here: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034626.html 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 -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]