My paper was titled “Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine.” My submitted text is here, but the presentation focused a bit more on Web 2.0 platforms than the paper itself (paper revisions to come). My slides (a 6.7MB PDF) are here.

For example, given a search for “Paris Hilton,” the perfect search engine will know whether to deliver results about the celebrity heiress or a place to spend the night in the French capitol, and whether to provide advertisements for Parisian bistros or celebrity news sites. This is where the search engines benefit most: by targeting the advertising to specific searches and particular users, search engines can charge much more for the targeted placement of that advertisement.

Google recognized early on the importance of designing a perfect search engine: the company’s very first press release noted that “a perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world…That is where Google is headed.” Google co-founder Larry Page later reiterated the goal of achieving the perfect search: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” When asked what a perfect search engine would be like, Sergey Brin once replied quite simply, “like the mind of God”

To attain such an omnipotent and omniscient ideal, Google provides results that suit the “context and intent” of the search query; it must have “perfect recall” of who the searcher is and her previous search-related activities. In order to discern the context and intent of a search for “Paris Hilton,” for example, the perfect search engine would know if the searcher has shown interest in European travel, or whether she spends time online searching for sites about celebrity gossip. Attaining such perfect recall requires search engine providers to collect as much information about their users as possible. In my dissertation I go to great lengths to describe how Google attempts to capture an incredibly large and diverse amount of a user’s online intellectual activities in order to fuel the perfect search and the personalized ads that accompany the results. I also, of course, present this as a serious threat to user privacy (it’s a longer argument than I have time for in this post).

Well, since Yahoo is doing everything possible to try to catch up with Google, they recently launched their own attempt to exploit users’ online activities in order to deliver personalized advertising: SmartAds. SmartAds promises advertisers the ability to “leverage Yahoo’s unique data and insights to deliver personalized marketing messages and drive click-thru rates.” Sounds great for marketers, but what does it mean for users? Simple: increased monitoring, collection, and aggregation of their online activities across Yahoo’s properties. Their slick demo even shows how easily Yahoo can identify a user’s home city, track his activity on Yahoo Games, and match it to his searches for “Las Vegas travel” in order to deliver the holy grail of personalized ads.

The (obvious) privacy concerns here are covered by this (surprisingly long and in-depth) report by ABC News (thanks, David Fraser). Paul Stephens of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse summarizes the privacy concerns in the story:

“I absolutely believe it is a threat to privacy,” Stephens told ABC News. “[SmartAds] is disconcerting because it’s compiling all sorts of information about you, things that you may have done a year ago on a Yahoo site, that you may have completely forgotten about.”

By targeting ads not only to a particular search term, as Google’s AdSense program does, but also incorporating a user’s history and profile information with Yahoo, SmartAds goes a dangerous step further than its competition in creating that complete user profile, Stephens said.

ABC’s report also provides a retort by Solveig Singleton:

But according to Solveig Singleton, a senior adjunct fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a market-based tech policy think tank, these privacy concerns are overblown. So long as companies like Yahoo and Google continue to keep financial records private, internet users can only benefit from the advance of technology.

“There’s no reason that this would create any additional security concern,” Singleton said. She disagrees with privacy advocates like Stephens who, she said, “often overlook that advertising and marketing really do serve consumers. It’s not some kind of trickery.”

The belief that “users can only benefit from the advance of technology” is fraught with problems, not the least of which is her faith that “keeping financial records private” is the primary concern here. I’m not at all worried about Yahoo (or Google for that matter) keeping insecure files. This isn’t about hackers being able to gain access to my personal information. It’s about whether it is right for a single company to capture and possess all the information in the first place. And it is about the ease at which such a single company could voluntarily turn that information over to law enforcement or other government agencies, both foreign and domestic.

Singleton also tries to cast aside any legitimate privacy concerns with her presumption that any benefit users might gain by having a targeted ad appear on their computer screen is necessarily a greater good than any harm caused by the collection of the personal information necessary to place that ad. As privacy advocates, we’re not stating there is some kind of “trickery” – but rather that the presumed trade-off in favor of consumers is at best unproven, and at worst invalid.

Here’s a final exchange of perspectives by Stephens and Singleton:

“In the aggregate all these innocuous pieces of information [compiled by SmartAds] paint a picture of you as a consumer that is so complete that nobody could possibly have all this information about yourself other than you and perhaps your spouse,” Stephens said.

But Singleton dismissed many of these concerns, saying that in the long run users will take the onus for protecting their privacy into their own hands by devising new ways to protect their identity — or, if they care enough, by switching over to another, more secure Web host.

Again, I side with Stephens. Singleton’s stance makes the collection of personal information by sites such as Yahoo the default and accepted position, and forces users to take action on their own in order to “protect their identity.” That is not an acceptable set of conditions in a free society (today is Independence Day, after all) where citizens should be able to enjoy intellectual exploration and web-based communication free from widespread surveillance. The default setting should not be for the wholesale monitoring and aggregation of one’s online activities. Rather, if a user wants personalized ads, let her opt-in for the service. Make it the users choice to be monitored; don’t force the user to take action to prevent from being monitored.

There’s much more for me to say on this, but it’s time to watch the fireworks celebrating our liberty…

I helped lead a discussion on privacy and web search engines, where I outlined my own research agenda as well as sketched the current landscape of scholarship on privacy and search engines. I promised to post a brief bibliography, so here is what I came up with off the top of my head (mostly legal and philosophical perspectives). Please, tell me what I’m missing.

Albrechtslund, A. (2006). Surveillance in searching: A study into ethical aspects of an emergent search culture (PDF). Paper presented at the EASST 2006.

Chopra, S., & White, L. (2007). Privacy and Artificial Agents, or, Is Google Reading My Email? Paper presented at the IJCAI 2007.

Gasser, U. (2006). Regulating search engines: Taking stock and looking ahead. Yale Journal of Law & Technology, 9, 124-157.

Goldberg, M. (2005). The googling of online privacy: Gmail, search-engine histories, and the new frontier of protecting private information on the web. Lewis & Clark Law Review, 9, 249-272.

Grimmelmann, J. (forthcoming) The structure of search engine law. Iowa Law Review, 93.

Hargittai, E. (Ed.) (2007). The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines. Special issue of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12(3).

Hinman, L. (2005). Esse est indicato in google: Ethical and political issues in search engines. International Review of Information Ethics, 3, 19-25.

Miller, J. (2005). “Don’t be evil”: Gmail’s relevant text advertisements violate google’s own motto and your e-mail privacy rights. Hofstra Law Review, 33(4), 1607-1641.

Norvig, P., Winograd, T., & Bowker, G. (2006, February 27). The Ethics and Politics of Search Engines. Panel at Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Pasquale, F. & Bracha, O. (2007). Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search.

Röhle, T. (2007). Desperately seeking the consumer: Personalized search engines and the commercial exploitation of user data. First Monday, 12 (9).

Rotenberg, B. (2007). Towards personalised search: EU data protection law and its implications for media pluralism (PDF). In M. Machill, & M. Beiler (Eds.), Die macht der suchmaschinen (The power of search engines). (pp. 87-104). Köln, Germany: Halem Verlag.

Tavani, H. T. (2005). Search engines, personal information and the problem of privacy in public. International Review of Information Ethics, 3, 39-45.

van Eijk, N. (2006). Search engines: Seek and ye shall find? The position of search engines in law. IRIS plus.

Zimmer, M. (2006, January). The value implications of the practice of paid search. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Zimmer, M. (2007). The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility. Unpublished Dissertation, New York University.

Zimmer, M. (forthcoming). The gaze of Web search engines: How Google Acts as an infrastructure of dataveillance. In A. Spink, & M. Zimmer (Eds.), Web searching: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

:: UPDATE: I’ve added Gasser and Van Eijk. (thanks Daithí)
:: UPDATE: Added Albrechtslund, Rotenberg, and Röhle (thanks Anders & Joris)

There has been increased attention lately about Google’s data retention policies and the impact its drive towards personalization might have on user privacy. In response, one of Google’s chief privacy lawyers, Peter Fleisher, whose opinion I normally have high regard for, has penned an op-ed piece (also found here and here) that recently appeared in the Financial Times.

The title of Fleisher’s piece is “Google’s search policy puts the user in charge” — a claim that is dangerously misleading.

In the op-ed, Fleisher touts the benefits of Google’s efforts to provide personalized search results (an important part of attaining the “perfect search engine“). With personalization, Google can provide the most relevant results (and advertisements, lest we forget) for ambiguous searches, such as “Paris Hilton.” He states:

…if an algorithm is built to take into account an individual’s preferences it has much more chance of guessing what that person is looking for. Personalised search uses previous queries to give more weight to what each user finds relevant to them in its rankings. If you have searched for information about handicaps or clubs before, a search for “golf” is more likely to return results about the game than the car. If you have been checking out the Louvre, you are less likely to have to wade through all the details of a particular heiress’s personal life.

Most anyone would agree that there are benefits to having search results tailored to the individual who performed the search. The concern, of course, is the trade-off for achieving this kind of efficiency. In the case of personalized search, that trade-off is user privacy, as Fleischer recognizes:

As the Financial Times has pointed out this week, personalised search does raise privacy issues. In order for it to work, search engines must have access to your web search history. And there are some people who may not want to share that information because they believe it is too personal. For them, the improved results that personalised search brings are not matched by the “cost” of revealing their web history.

(This concern, of course, is the basis of much of my research.)

Fleischer tries to resolve this crisis himself with a simple (but as we will see below, dangerously misleading) claim: that Google puts users in charge of whether to reveal their web search history. He explains:

We believe that the responsible way to handle this privacy issue is to ask users if they want to opt in to the service. That is why Google requires people to open an account and turn on their personalised search functionality. They do not have to give a real name to open a Google account, but even if they cannot be identified, we think they should have to give explicit consent before their web history is used. Unless they do, they will simply have the standard Google search service.Our policy puts the user in charge. It is not something Google seeks to control. At any time they can turn off personal search, pause it, remove specific web history items or remove the whole lot.

While it is true that users can opt into Google’s Web History product – effectively deciding whether they want their search results to be tweaked based on their search history – as well as remove items from the Web History service, this form of “user control” does not eliminate concerns over user privacy nor absolve Google of any responsibility in that regard.

It is vital for every user of Goolge (indeed, neary all search engines) to understand that their searches, results clicked, and other actions on Google’s platform are routinely monitored, logged, aggregated, and stored by Google. It says so right in Web History product’s own privacy FAQ (emphasis added):

4. What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Web History service?

You can choose to stop storing your web activity in Web History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in Web History Help. If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your search experience. As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users.

These logs are explained in Google’s main privacy policy, which acknowledges the collection of “information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser” as well as links that are clicked and other clickstream data.

Let me repeat this: Whether users opt in or out of Google’s Web History in order to personalize their searches, their activity on Google is still being tracked. Whether users delete some or all of the data in the Web History product interface, their activity on Google is still being tracked. Any privacy concerns that a user has about Google watching, tracking, and logging their search activity remains regardless of their actions related to the Web History product.

It is this kind of misleading rhetoric that lures users into thinking that Google is going out of their way to protect user privacy. It minimizes the threats of privacy online, lessens user’s expectations of privacy, and results in an atmostphere where the widespread monitoring and collection of user activity becomes normalized and unproblematic.

For Fleischer to suggest — in capacity of Google’s global privacy counsel — that users are in control of the privacy of their web search activities simply by allowing them to remove data from the Web Search history interface is dangerously misleading, and borderline negligent. I call on him — and Google — to correct this rhetoric and fully acknowledge how user privacy is impacted by Google’s techncial design and business practices, regardless of any kind of “control” users have with the Web History product.

UPDATE: Like I said above, I usually find Peter Fleischer’s comments and perspective on Google & privacy useful. Case in point: he has recently come out to say that Google’s privacy policy is “vague” and that the company “could do better” in crafting and communicating their position on user privacy. I hope he also addresses my concerns above.

For example, given a search for “Paris Hilton,” the perfect search engine will know whether to deliver results about the celebrity socialite, complete with the requisite image and video files, or a place to spend the night in France, complemented with photos of the property, maps, and even flight information.

John Battelle has summarized how such an omniscient and omnipotent search engine might work:

Imagine the ability to ask any question and get not just an accurate answer, but your perfect answer – an answer that suits the context and intent of your question, an answer that is informed by who you are and why you might be asking. The engine providing this answer is capable of incorporating all the world’s knowledge to the task at hand – be it captured in text, video, or audio. It’s capable of discerning between straightforward requests – who was the third president of the United States? – and more nuanced ones – under what circumstances did the third president of the United States foreswear his views on slavery?

This perfect search also has perfect recall – it knows what you’ve seen, and can discern between a journey of discovery – where you want to find something new – and recovery – where you want to find something you’ve seen before.

Google recognized early on the importance of designing a perfect search engine: the company’s very first press release noted that “a perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world…That is where Google is headed.” Google co-founder Larry Page later reiterated the goal of achieving the perfect search: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

Over the years, Google has taken a variety of steps towards achieving the “perfect reach” necessary to build the perfect search engine. In their effort to “organize the world’s information,” the reach of Google’s crawlers and index has expanded well beyond websites to include other online documents as well, such as images, news feeds, Usenet archives, and video files. Additionally, Google has begun digitizing the “material world,” adding the contents of popular books, university libraries, maps, and satellite images to their growing index. Users can also search the files on their hard drives, send e-mail and instant messages, shop online, and even engage in social networking through Google. Consequently, users increasingly search, find, and relate to information through Google’s growing information infrastructure of search-related services and tools. They also use these tools to communicate, navigate, shop, and organize their lives. By providing a medium for various social, intellectual, and commercial activities, “Planet Google” has become a large part of people’s lives, both online and off.

Today, Google took another step in further integrating these disparate products and services with their new “Universal Search” product:

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

For example, a user searching for information on the Star Wars character Darth Vader is likely interested in all the information related to the character and the actor – not just web pages that mention the movie. Google will now deliver a single set of blended search results that include a humorous parody of the movie, images of the Darth Vader character, news reports on the latest Lucas film, as well as websites focused on the actor James Earl Jones – all ranked in order of relevance to the query. Users no longer have to visit several different Google search properties to find such a wide array of information on the topic.

This moves Google closer towards achieving the “perfect reach” necessary for the perfect search engine – something that will make Planet Google even more alluring and difficult to resist.

(I’m on a deadline tonight, so my general thoughts as to how the perfect search engine represents a Faustian bargain – especially when we consider its other half: perfect recall – will have to wait for another time…)

The mechanisms are already in place for search engines to track your online behavior. Tool bars, mini apps, personal search history. All of these can and do track where you’ve been. Everybody is being tracked to some degree.

But as Seana pointed out in her column, most of us are blissfully unaware of it. That’s because it’s been relatively benign to this point. In return for a handy tool bar that offers increased convenience, the ability to index your desktop and other added functionality, we just click the accept button without really reading what we’re accepting. Up to now, there hasn’t seemed to be any consequences. But in the background, the engines are quietly collecting terabytes of click-stream data.

Unfortunately, he casts this concern aside much too quickly:

More and more consumer groups will launch protests. Politicians will sense opportunity and jump on their soapboxes. There will be a very vocal minority that will rail against this “Big Brotherism.” There will also be a group of advertisers that will continue to step way beyond the acceptable, using targeting to subvert the user experience, rather than enhance it, hijacking the user and taking them to places they never intended. This will add fuel to the fire. And because they’re the most visible target, the search engines will bear the brunt of the attack.

In the end, we’ll realize there’s much more pro than con here. Effective targeting will generally add to our experience, not take away from it. We’ll toy with trying to use a third-party privacy filter, but in the end, most of us won’t be willing to give up the additional functionality in return for maintaining an illusion of anonymity online. Much of the usefulness of Web 2.0 (I know, I hate the term too, but at least it’s commonly understood) will be dependent on capturing personal and click-stream data. We’ll give in, and the storm will gradually fade away on the horizon.

Our goal must be to make consumers aware of the trade-offs between providing enormous amounts of personal information in exchange for a “convenient” toolbar or a contextually-relevant ad. We must not allow people to give in so easily.

[via Pogo Was Right]

This grant will support my dissertation research of the value implications of two emerging technologies of everyday life: networked vehicle systems and web search engines. Networked vehicle systems (GPS-based navigational tools, automated toll collection, automobile black boxes, and vehicle safety communication systems) rely on the transmission, collection and aggregation of a particular vehicle’s location and telemetry data. The drive towards the “perfect” web search engine (providing personalized results and delivering only relevant advertising) depends on the profiling of users’ online activities and interests. Taken together, these technologies represent emerging threats to one’s “privacy on the roads”: on the one hand, networked vehicle systems enable the widespread surveillance of drivers traveling on the public highways, and on the other, a perfect search engine facilitates the monitoring and aggregation of one’s intellectual activities on the information superhighway.

Specifically, this grant will allow me to travel to three specialized research sites that will make theoretical, material, and pragmatic contributions to my project:

• Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, where I will study with Prof. Philip Brey to enrich my investigation of the relationship between values and technology, and work alongside both philosophers and engineers sensitive to the value implications of technology
• Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where I will work alongside Prof. Sven Ove Hansson and other scholars dedicated to the ethics of traffic technology, and observe pragmatic interventions within Swedish automotive and technical communities
• Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where I will study with Prof. Phoebe Sengers to help gain a critical understanding of the relationship between technology and culture, and witness the application of critical technical practice to real design situations

I am very excited about this opportunity, which wouldn’t be possible without the guidance of my dissertation chair, Prof. Helen Nissenbaum, and my other committee members, Profs Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alex Galloway.

Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.
As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.
Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc.

I agree with John Battelle that the notion of Google storing 100% of my data on their servers is quite unsettling.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

To repeat my original privacy-related concerns, Google is moving more and more towards building a broad information infrastructure which requires setting up accounts which link personal information across services. Doing this allows Google to aggregate all your personal content (Gmail, calendar entries, etc) in order to not only provide you a more personalized search experience (perhaps a good thing), but also to deliver you more personalized advertising (perhaps a good thing, perhaps not). In all, this again raises interesting value implications (privacy, autonomy, etc) of the Googlization of more and more of our lives.

But Chris Hoofnagle points to this article, published in a database-marketing-industry magazine, that refutes the data industry’s own argument on the creation of a perfect marketplace through the use of consumer data:

With sharp advances in database marketing, the proliferation of data mining and the widespread adherence to principles associated with precision marketing, the logical expectation is that customer acquisition and retention rates would rise as direct marketers shift from mass marketing toward one-to-one marketing.

Not quite.

Though the illusion of effectiveness has been enhanced under the veil of advanced profiling, sophisticated analytics and targeted messaging, the reality for DM managers is declining response rates amid increasing industry mail volumes. The volume of household direct mail has more than doubled in the past five years while response rates have been halved.