Google and privacy

For this assignment, I looked for articles discussing Google and privacy. I searched LexisNexis Academic to find news articles about this subject. I decided that news articles would probably be the most current and plentiful, as opposed to scholarly articles. Scholarly articles might still be useful depending on what, specifically, you were looking for information for.  This database allowed me to search a number of sub-databases, with the default, and the one I used, being “Major U.S. and World Publications”.

I found an article from TechWeb called “Google Offers Web Searchers, Chrome Users More Privacy”. It was from an Web-based newswire story and talked about Google reducing the amount of time it keeps server log data and changing its Google Suggest feature to make data more private. IP addresses will be made anonymous on server logs after 9 months instead of 18 months, and will be made anonymous for Google Suggest data within 24 hours, or, as a Google Vice President said, “basically, as soon as we practically can.” The data from Google Suggest is collected from terms that people type into Google search boxes without pressing “enter” or clicking “search”. This is to help suggest possible search terms to users. Most of this data is not recorded, but 2% is logged “to monitor and improve the service. This feature is used in both Google Search and Google’s new browser, Chrome, as well as Mozilla Firefox. I found this information useful because it relates directly to Google’s privacy policies, specifically their policies regarding IP address that can identify those who make specific searches. There is a lot of potential for things such as the government subpoenaing search records, which could have implications for criminal prosecutions, for example. There have already been cases of people’s Web searches being used against them in court. In the case of Google Suggest, information could be used that people did not even technically “search” on Google.

The keywords I used for this search were “Google and privacy”. I used them because they were the simplest and most likely to get me useful information. The “and” operator limited results to those that dealt with both Google and privacy. The information was created and published by TechWeb. It seemed to try to be convincing me at the end of the article that Google’s previous privacy practices were poor, but it might now be improving. Its point of view was that Google had not been very concerned about privacy previously, but now seems willing to take privacy advocate’s concerns into consideration. I am not aware of any publisher bias, but I am also not very familiar with the publisher.

The information was created fairly recently. The publication date on the article is September 9, 2008. The information is not too old to use because it reflects recent developments. It might be too old to use if there have been any major new developments since publication, especially those that would substantially affect the information in the article; for instance, if Google decided to reverse their decision.

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