Don't worry about the government invading your privacy--it's Google and Yahoo! and MSN you should really worry about.Perhaps I should be upset with Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. Justice Department, and even President Bush for pressuring Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and other major search-engine companies to provide the government with records of searches made by our citizens. That move looks like a remarkably swift and sure invasion of our privacy.
But if you were around during the super-paranoid days of the 60's and 70's, as I was, you would be well aware that this is the sort of thing the U.S. government does in the normal course of business. Indeed, wiretapping and other forms of electronic eavesdropping -- with and without court sanction -- date back to Civil War days, when Abraham Lincoln authorized listening in on telegraph lines to find out what Johnny Reb was up to.
But I am very very upset with the search companies for even having that data. It turns out that they keep it -- all of it! Every search you ever make is carefully recorded and archived. Why? Well, as the search companies explain, it helps them with their marketing; the search data enables them to better target advertisements to those who are more likely to buy the advertised products.
Funny; that sounds like something of an invasion of privacy to me, and it also sounds like something you can do with a month's worth of sample data, not something you need a full-tilt archive for.
More important, the practice of archiving all that search data sounds like a source of legal vulnerability for you. That's because if your company has a fixed IP address, searches made by you and your employees can be traced. This is normally not a problem.
But if you wind up being investigated for some legal thing, perhaps a violation of an industry regulation, it may be a big problem. Even more likely, such records are a handy way for someone to develop evidence that your company provides a hostile workplace environment, especially if pornographic material or other socially offensive information has been downloaded to your address.
E-mail archives have become a wondrous source of evidence in white-collar criminal cases. New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer has practically turned e-mail searches into a specialized branch of jurisprudence, and this dates back much further. For example, the U.S. government used a ton of e-mail evidence in its case against Microsoft, and more recently and famously, Enron prosecutors are bringing wheelbarrows full of e-mail into the courtroom.
And don't think for a second that once prosecutors and other attorneys realize that search-company archives contain useful evidence, they won't pounce on them and start hauling Google records into court. So beware when you search for anything. Make sure it's for a legitimate business reason, something that makes sense in terms of what your company does.
If you can avoid it, don't search at all -- that is, until Google and friends stop ogling you.
