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Monday, August 13, 2007
Searching for trouble
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Search engines like Google and Yahoo would have a weird story to tell if they could talk. What a person searches for online offers - over time - a virtual online biography of the person doing the searching. You’d learn about their hobbies, their professional interests, their family and - yeah - their vices.
Trouble is, of course, that search engines do talk. Records of your searches - protected for your privacy in various forms - do exist. And, in the very worst case, these records can be used by law enforcement to build a case against you. That seldom happens, of course, but when it does the results can be dramatic.
I’ll link to an article here that says, among other things, that “Search terms have been used to convict a wireless hacker and lock up a man charged with killing his wife. Search engine activity is also a fertile growth area for nosy divorce lawyers and employment disputes.”
I recommend the article to you because it does set out some of the risks to your privacy. But, especially important, it provides a really simple way of masking your search records.
You don’t need a guilty conscience to care about this. Searches for everything from mass murderers to sex criminals to ways to spam - based on my job and my stepdaughter’s sociology degree - have clicked right by the screen.
The article also rates the various search engines for the protection offered by their privacy policies. The name of the winner may surprise you.
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