Danny Sullivan Data Quotations

Search engines compile a lot of data on what we search for and much of what we search for is personal. Many people fear that the government wants to do data mining. It'll be interesting to see how much of all this ultimately becomes a political issue.

If the government wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches, then they are asking for data that is useless to them. You can get that information from other companies.

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo did not violate the privacy of any user by handing over this information. No private data was revealed. Nevertheless, by not pushing back against such a bad request for data, it leaves open the real fear that they might not push back if the US government decided to go on a real fishing expedition in the future. Privacy may not have been lost but trust was.

Nothing suggests that they wanted to know who did the searches in any way. Having said this, such a move absolutely should breed some paranoia. They didn't ask for data this time, but next time, they might.

I'm interested to see if the search companies who handed over info to the feds lose any market share and/or total number of searches in the future due to sharing data with the government.