In an example of subtle synchronicity, last week, the Center for Democracy & Technology released a report on "the work in progress" made by Internet search firms to create more privacy friendly practices, and, on the same day, Google debuted a paint-by-the-numbers YouTube video on search privacy. This comes not so long after we talked about using privacy as a competitive advantage.
You can grab CDT's full report here or see their top-line recommendations after the jump...
Google's video is below...
21,000+ views in five days. Not bad. (Though, the comments on the YouTube page indicate that Google may be trying to wrestle privacy, but also still has a long way to defeat comment spam).
Update: CNET has a piece today that, like CDT, has a side-by-side comparison of search provider privacy practices. CNET doesn't mention the CDT report.
CDT's search privacy recommendations:
Search companies should continue to work towards providing controls that allow users to not only extend but also limit the information stored about them. As it becomes possible to tie more and more information back to an individual user account, users should control the correlation of their account information with records of their online activities.
Researchers, academics, and Internet companies should continue to pursue new and innovative methods for (1) improving the quality of search results, preventing fraud and otherwise meeting business needs without tying searches to particular users, and (2) safeguarding data that is stored for long periods.
Search companies should expand efforts to develop policies that balance the demands of the advertising marketplace with their users’ privacy needs. This should include the development of new standards and policies that take privacy into account from the beginning.
Internet companies should leverage their contracts with partners to promote privacy protections across the board. Consumers can also exert pressure to improve privacy practices by staying informed and making use of available privacy tools.
No amount of self-regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actors. With consumers sharing more data than ever before online, the time has come to harmonize our nation’s privacy laws into a simple, flexible framework.
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