In Google, Yahoo, Should We Trust?
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060214_google_yahoo_trust1/ Posted on
Feb. 14, 2006
By Mark Malseed
An unsettling reality has begun to descend on the millions of fans and
devotees of the Internet giants Google and Yahoo: *They know an awful lot
about us.*
Every Google search ever typed, every Yahoo news article ever read—all are
logged and stored indefinitely in these companies' massive databases. Think
about that for a moment. We whisper a lot into the ears of these shadowy
search engines, including plenty of secrets that we'd want to keep from our
spouses and kids. And we do so without ever bothering to check what is being
done with that information.
If you don't already know, let me be the first to tell you: Google, Yahoo
and their less-well-known brethren are keeping tabs on what is being
searched, viewed and clicked on, all across their sprawling Web empires.
You know all those e-mails you've sent using free services such as Yahoo
Mail or Google's Gmail? They are kept for posterity on company servers, even
in cases when they have been deleted from users' accounts. And instant
messages? A new service from Google leaves a digital record long after the
conversations have been forgotten. Driving directions? Not only do Google
and Yahoo know the way to our intended destination, they also know that we
probably made the trip. (We all but told them we were going, didn't we?)
Searches are not by default linked to our names—only to an Internet address
or a unique browser ID. But armed with that information, investigators and
sometimes the companies themselves can make the crucial link to our names
and addresses.
Existing laws offer fewer protections for data and e-mail communications
stored by a third party than for the contents of someone's personal
computer. And though there are gray areas in the law, this much is clear:
plenty of what the search engines have amassed about us may be obtained
without a wiretap or search warrant.
The words we type into Google may seem anonymous and innocuous at the
instant we're doing a search, almost as if we are confessing to some digital
high priest: "Lord, just between you and me, I am fascinated with . . .
recreational drugs, bondage, Islamic radicalism, how to cheat my friends at
poker. . . . " But our inquiries leave behind permanent tracks that could
come back to haunt someday.
Consider for a moment what a complete history of just your Internet searches
alone might reveal. Chances are the list would offer pretty good clues as to
your political leanings, your health condition, your finances, your job
satisfaction, your marital fidelity, your obsessions and addictions, and
plenty else that you may want to keep private.
Add to that the full archive of your Web e-mails—and depending on what other
Yahoo or Google services you use, a partial or full record of your Web
surfing habits—and these companies have got a fairly comprehensive digital
dossier on you, me and several hundred million other people.
This is a treasure trove by any accounting, and potentially a very valuable,
perfectly legitimate asset to criminal and terrorism investigations. But
such an accumulation of personal data also presents a tempting target for
intrusive fishing expeditions by law enforcement, divorce lawyers,
government prosecutors and even less savory characters.
What's more, the whereabouts of this data are generally kept secret. The
records are sequestered in undisclosed locations, entirely out of our
control, and may even be stored in a country other than the one in which a
user lives, raising potential legal complications.
In China, both companies have come under fire for complying with the
communist regime's censoring of the Internet. Yahoo has twice turned over
personally identifying information about Chinese dissidents that led to
their being jailed.
Here in the United States, the search engines say they comply with legal
requests for information, but they rarely comment on the extent of their
cooperation in handing over search data for criminal or civil cases. (In at
least *one case <http://www.wral.com/news/5287261/detail.html>*, a person's
search history was used in prosecution, but that information was skimmed
from his own computer.) Nevertheless, unless laws are rewritten or company
policies changed, the search engines will find themselves increasingly
bombarded with subpoenas for their users' search histories.
If all this sounds like a privacy disaster in the making, it is one that
until recently has received scant attention in the mainstream press.
Google's generally gung-ho media coverage has glossed over some of the
serious concerns that privacy advocates have voiced about its
information-hording habits.
This week's *cover
story<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1158920,00.html>
* in Time magazine is a perfect example. Despite a cover headline that
provocatively asks, "Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets?" the article
largely dodges the question, instead retracing (yet again) the admittedly
impressive rise of the seven-year-old firm. Not until the last paragraph
does it break what is surely news to many people, mentioning in passing that
Google "retains loads of our data—what we search for, what we say in our
Gmails—so we need to know it won't be evil with them."
Well, indeed, it would be reassuring to know Google intends to uphold its
unofficial motto of "Don't Be Evil" with regard to our records. But how does
one prove that? What we really need to know more about—and this is a matter
of fact, not conjecture—is what data are being retained; for how long; who
has access to the information, and for what purposes; and what our rights
are under the law.
Given the fact that Google just made a $1-billion investment in AOL (which
is owned by Time magazine's parent company, Time Warner), one might expect
the magazine to give the search company gentle treatment on touchy issues.
It's not going to bite the hand that is helping to rescue papa. But how
about some tougher questioning? The softballs lobbed in the
accompanying *interview
transcript<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1158956,00.html>
* reveal that the Google guys are still fun and down to earth, which they
are, but they shed no light on the advertised topic of "Can we trust them?"
The existence of detailed logs like the ones Google and Yahoo compile has
never been a secret among technology insiders. Owners and developers of
websites naturally want to have data on what's being viewed, how often and
by whom, as this helps in analyzing and improving operations and in spotting
malicious attacks. In some ways, it is no different than in the offline
world, where businesses like to keep a careful eye on their inventories and
customers.
Yet neither Google or Yahoo has exactly called attention to the fact that it
keeps comprehensive records on its users' movements. Google has been around
for seven years now, Yahoo for nearly 11, yet the vast majority of visitors
to these sites remain unaware they are being tracked. Precisely because it
might scare off users, this revelation is kept in the fine print of privacy
policies, which few people read. Google doesn't even link to its privacy
policy from its lily-white home page. (Is that "evil"?)
So last month's news that the Justice Department had subpoenaed search
records from Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft came as an eye-opening jolt.
Loyal users, investors and the media began asking long-overdue questions.
What exactly was in those records and for the taking? Could search engines
produce lists of what searches came from what Internet addresses?
Tech-news site CNET posed a series of *specific
questions<http://news.com.com/Verbatim+Search+firms+surveyed+on+privacy/2100-1025_3-6034626.html>
* along these lines to several major search engines, but many of the
responses were comically short on detail. "We keep data for as long as it is
useful," said a Google spokesman when asked if records were ever purged. A
Yahoo rep offered this: "We maintain data that will help us provide users
with the best possible experience."
The specifics of the Justice Department subpoena were as follows: Federal
prosecutors, hoping to revive a previously overturned law protecting minors
from exposure to pornography, went googling for data that would buttress
their case. (Some early reports about the subpoena said the law in question
dealt with child pornography, which was not true.)
Initially, the government demanded a list of every website address available
on Google and every search term entered during July 2005—a staggering amount
of data, considering that Google handles 300 million searches per day. The
request was later narrowed to a list of 1 million random Web pages and all
the search queries for a given week.
Perhaps trying to show off its bureaucratic muscle for data-crunching, the
Justice Department also requested similar information from Yahoo, America
Online and Microsoft, all of which have said they turned over some
aggregated data, though they have not specified how much.
Their compliance with the subpoena is disappointing from a privacy
standpoint, but it does not add up to a doomsday scenario. None of the
search engines released any personally identifiable information to the
government, nor were they asked to.
Google, to its credit, gallantly refuses to turn over any data at all. The
company is being seen by many as taking a stand against the Bush
administration, which is not well liked in Silicon Valley. "The demand for
the information is overreaching," Google attorney Nicole Wong told the San
Jose Mercury News, which broke the subpoena story. Google co-founder Sergey
Brin later told
*Bloomberg<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=at.0suYD_qJQ&refer=us>
*, "We don't think it's a proper subpoena for some legal case; it's not
anything we're even a party to." (A court hearing is scheduled for Feb. 27.)
Brin's main reason for putting up a fight, of course, is to protect Google's
business. The Internet is as hotly competitive as ever, and while Google
holds a commanding market share in search, Yahoo is still the most visited
website in the world and Microsoft is still king of the desktop. Google does
not want to give them or anyone else a window into its proprietary
information. Nor does it want to see a precedent established for regular
government trawling of its data, which might make users and investors
skittish.
But Google has its work cut out, in part because of the high expectations it
has set for itself. Even as the search leader seems to be standing firm
against the Department of Justice, it sent the opposite signal last month
when it rolled over and acceded to the Chinese government's wishes.
By launching a China-based service in January, Google agreed to *actively
restrict <http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060125-072617>* certain Web
pages on the totalitarian government's behalf, a stark departure from its
thumb-in-the-nose approach to, at one time or another, its venture
capitalists, Wall Street and even the SEC.
Although Google has operated a Chinese-language site for several years, the
site had been run from outside the country and served unfiltered content
that the government then censored through its so-called *Great Firewall of
China<http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engASA170072002?OpenDocument&of=COUNTRIESCHINA>
*. After much internal debate, Google's founders and executives made peace
with the Chinese regime's demands, deciding that was best for business and,
they also argue, ultimately was a way to break down the oppressive speech
restrictions.
Yahoo, which also operates in China, has come under even more intense fire
for its apparent role in the jailing of two activists. The cases, which have
been publicized by the human rights groups Reporters Without Borders and
Amnesty International, have also sparked bipartisan criticism in Washington.
"I don't like any American company ratting out a citizen for speaking out
against their government," Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat and member of the
House Human Rights Subcommittee, told
*Reuters<http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-02-10T075233Z_01_N0917515_RTRUKOC_0_US-CHINA-INTERNET.xml&archived=False>
* last week. The committee is holding a hearing on Feb. 15 on the activities
of U.S.-based Internet companies in China, and lawmakers have said they
intend to push Yahoo to reveal what information it has provided to the
Chinese government.
It's easy to take an absolutist stance and condemn Google and Yahoo for
their decisions to do business in China given the strict censorship. But to
stay out would mean compromising the service they provide to the world's
second-largest Internet audience. (If Google didn't agree to
self-censorship, the Chinese government's Great Firewall would do the
censoring, and that firewall greatly slows down the speed of the Web.) For
companies whose missions are all about open information, but which need
millions of satisfied users to keep their advertising engines running, this
was a tough call.
Then again, the serious privacy concerns outlined above—namely, that Google
and Yahoo know all and see all—now come into play for China's 1.3 billion
citizens, whose government is not as mindful of rights and legal processes
as our own.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page may be young tech geeks but,
make no mistake, they are also shrewd businessmen. They are visionaries too,
with a grand mission to organize all the world's information and make it
accessible.
Yahoo's leaders have a similarly broad vision, which they summarize with the
acronym FUSE, for "find, use, share and expand all human knowledge."
No ordinary dot-com enterprises, these are powerful global juggernauts whose
actions matter, whose products increasingly define how we experience the
Internet.
Brin and Page tend to beg forgiveness, not permission, when pursuing their
bold ideas, as was the case in 2004 when they launched Gmail, a free e-mail
service that automatically scanned the contents of messages to display
relevant ads. Despite complaints by privacy advocates, the duo did not back
down, insisting that the novel features and massive free storage capacity
would win over users. They have. Gmail accounts are in high demand, and are
now being offered in a *trial
version<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/big-mail-on-campus.html>
* to schools and businesses.
Still, the Google guys' penchant for pushing boundaries and challenging the
status quo may make them party to landmark legal struggles in coming years,
perhaps reaching as high as the Supreme Court.
Locked in a fierce battle for supremacy on the Internet, Google and Yahoo
are innovating at a dizzying pace, in fields ranging from advertising to
video search to artificial intelligence, biology, energy, even space
exploration. Yahoo is aggressively researching new forms of online
communities to engage its enormous audience of 420 million registered users,
such as the free photo sharing site Flickr. Google, meanwhile, is busy
scanning millions of library books without regard for traditional copyright
laws, and it has quietly embarked on a project with maverick scientist Craig
Venter to build a database of genetic and biological information.
Funding this race is a robust online advertising business that generates
billions of dollars in yearly revenue for each of the companies. In order to
deliver the best-performing ads, the firms will strive to learn and
anticipate our wants, needs and aspirations. And that probably means tapping
into our surfing habits, search histories, personal preferences and more.
How do we balance the admittedly impressive features that Google and Yahoo
provide, on the one hand, and cherished notions of personal privacy on the
other? There are small steps users can take to minimize the digital dossiers
that these companies can amass—for example, clearing "cookies" from Web
browsers every so often, or using different sites for search and for e-mail.
But the lead must come from the firms themselves.
Tomorrow's Internet will be far more interesting than today's—which is why
it is critical for the leading search engines to work out industry-wide
privacy standards sooner rather than later. They can start by resisting
unwarranted requests for data, appointing internal "chief privacy officers,"
and being more forthcoming about what information they record and share with
third parties.
Until that day, and probably for as long as they are around, Google and
Yahoo will know a lot more about us than we know about them.
*Mark Malseed is coauthor of "The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business,
Media and Technology Success of Our Time," an international bestseller that
is being published in 17 languages worldwide. Formerly the researcher to Bob
Woodward for the books "Plan of Attack" and "Bush at War," Malseed
contributes to numerous online and offline publications, including The
Washington Post. *
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