no, keeping a full record of search queries is not evil

[Eugen Leitl]

...not at all. Not the slightest bit evil.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/01/what_if_we_prom.html

What if we promise not to show the records to Karl Rove?

If you don't regularly anonymize your Google cookie and purge your
personalized search history, now might be a good time to start (then again, in
this day and age, why bother?). The Department of Justice on Wednesday asked a
federal judge to order Google  to comply with a subpoena issued last year for
search records stored in its databases. The DOJ argues that the information it
has requested, which includes one million random Web addresses and records of
all Google searches from a one-week period, is essential to its upcoming
defense of the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act. Google
has so far refused to comply with the subpoena, saying the release of such
information would violate the privacy of its users. "Google is not a party to
this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Nicole
Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, told The Mercury News. "[We
plan to fight the government's effort] "vigorously.''  Here's hoping the
company prevails.  The release of such records sets a truly unsettling
precedent. And if the goverment's claim that other, unspecified search engines
have already agreed to release similar information proves true, we have
already lost our footing on a very slippery, very dangerous slope.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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