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Lauren Weinstein Calls for Search Privacy Working Group

22 August 2006 260 views 4 Comments Print This Post

Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility and the moderator of the PRIVACY Forum, has made an impassioned call for the formation of a working group to tackle issue of search engine history data retention, mining and sharing policies:

Participation by all stakeholders would be invited. Representatives of the major search engine firms and concerned government agencies, outside technologists and other persons involved in privacy and search issues, and other entities as appropriate, would all play important roles.

Of course, it’s easy — especially for large corporate enterprises — to simply ignore such efforts and just plow ahead independently. Obviously, without the participation of the key players, the effort that I’m proposing would be useless, and I will not continue to promote it if that situation ensues.

However, I suggest that it will be in the long-term best interests, both financially and in terms of corporate and organizational responsibility, for major stakeholders to actively join such a project, since the alternative seems ever more likely to be somewhere between highly disruptive and extremely draconian.

If interested, let him know.

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4 Comments »

  • Privacy Digest: Privacy News (Civil Rights, Encryption, Free Speech, Cryptography) said:

    Lauren Weinstein Calls for Search Privacy Working Group….

  • Mrs Frost said:

    How can I go about getting my name and private information take off of the internet..? I have written zaba several times to be removed, and my name and information is still there.Your life is really not yours anymore with all the personal information others can get on you for free.This could really lead to disaster for some. Problems with idenity theft, and worse could happen with this information being so open.People are really frightned now.I would be willing to pay to get my information removed, if it were guarenteed. I have tried writing, and e-mailing with no results. The only other thing I know to do is to contact the attorney general.
    Do you have any suggestions? Thanks…

  • Michael Zimmer (author) said:

    Unfortunately, the information sites like Zabasearch provide is public information (from phone book databases, register of deeds, etc), and there is little you can do to remove your personal data from the public sphere. Here is a good essay on the legality of Zabasearch: Can We Stop Zabasearch?

    If it is any consolation, you can create a ZabaAlert in order to be notified whenever someone performs a search for your name.

  • Bob said:

    Search proxies are easy and free heres a decent one.

    http://www.blackboxsearch.com

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