August 1, 2007
Google makes it more personal – but carefully
It is obvious that Google is taking very seriously the concerns that arose earlier this year over its privacy policies.
Google is between a rock and a hard place on this one. On the one hand, with the internet at more than 15bn pages, it is essential to make searches more personalised and tailored, otherwise we may drown in too much information.
On the other hand, privacy activists and consumers dislike the idea that someone is compiling and keeping detailed profiles on them.
So, each time Google now announces a new step in personalising internet searches, there is a softly-softly approach to reassure that rights are not being trampled.
The latest example was Google’s announcement on Wednesday that it was launching international versions of its “web history” service, which tracks all the web pages a user has ever visited and allows them to search and go back to them. The idea is that that funny video or recipe you half remember looking at will be easier to revisit.
The service has already been in use in the US, but will now be operational in 26 languages, from Chinese and Hebrew to Norwegian and Portuguese.
To make sure the Norwegian authorities – for example - didn’t have an apoplectic fit over the announcement, the press call was handled not only by Sep Kamvar, the head personalisation engineer, but also Peter Fleischer, Google’s head of privacy. He spoke for almost as long as Mr Kamvar.
In fact, it is very simple. The service is optional, and opt-in services have never been a problem for privacy activists. Getting people to “opt-in” is a handy way for Google to push forward personalisation developments and stay within international laws.
What Google doesn’t reveal, however, is how many people are opting in to personalisation. This is a shame, as it would be a useful gauge for privacy regulators – if most Google users are opting to personalise their searches at the risk of less privacy, perhaps search history privacy is not an issue to worry about. If personalisation is not proving popular, however, it may be Google that needs a re-think.
