Search Engine and Information Privacy: A Shared Responsibility.

Search Engine and Information Privacy: A Shared Responsibility

This days search engine services are in a great position. For example, in the west, the biggest is Google, and it seems to be everywhere. But, depending on the region, even a big fish like Google can have problems. In Europe countries like Spain and France have sued Google for information privacy matter.

In this article we are going to discuss information privacy and the responsibility of business and users.

First of all, we have to answer de question “What is Information Privacy? What are the search engines and what does concern (to?). Information privacy is the privacy of personal information and usually relates to personal data stored on computer systems. The need to maintain information privacy is applicable to collected personal information, such as medical records, financial data, criminal records, political records, business related information or website data. Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information or other sensitive information is collected, stored, used, and finally destroyed or deleted – in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues.
Search engines are a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.

So what’s with Search Engines and Information privacy? Well, Google, Bing, Yahoo – all the major search engines track your search history and build profiles on you, serving different results based on your search history.

Google and Yahoo are big, there’s no question about it, and this giants does not just offers Search Engine services but also E-mails and docs on line. The problem is that this 2 big enterprise “Reads” your personal E-Mails and offer you personalized ads, Yes, they sells ads, using your information and that’s a violation of your Privacy.

In the other hand, we must talk about users and their responsibility in this “problem”. Search engines may use our information, and even without asking permission, but what are we letting they know? Have you thought about what are you shearing in Social Networks? Or what are you writing to subscribe on some website. Those are value data and we shared as if nothing. Our name, age, address and even our ID number among others. In Social networks we share our relationships, our kinship, our jobs, where do we go, what do we ear, what kind of music we like, what stores we shopping and pretty much everything what we do. As an example there was this video on Youtube where a guy impersonating a clairvoyant. He just asked them their name, and another person search his Facebook profile ant told him by earphone. That way the clairvoyant could say them many thing that are supposedly impossible for him to know, all the persons end up amazed. And why do we talk about this? Because we as users also have “Responsibilities”. In the Age of Information, our Data it is the most valuable thing we can have and it depends on us to guard it.

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