SEO Copy Writer

A new report by Elise Ackerman of the Mercury News, is asking the questions that the search engine companies don’t want to answer. Ackerman is pushing the four search giants (Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN) to answer questions about the true extent of your privacy with regards to the volumes of information they track about you.

You know every computer has a unique identifing number (IP) and everytime you log in and do a search, they know exactly who you are and follow your search trends. They then market to those trends, but that not the worst of it.

According to Ackerman, the search logs reveal intimate details about your search habits. For example:

A few weeks after the Mercury News made its request to the companies, AOL published the searches of about 658,000 AOL users on a public Web site as part of an effort to share data with researchers. The searches, which were done from March to May, provided an incredibly intimate glimpse into the lives of the searchers.

On March 1, AOL User 310416 looked for “how to self induce your own labor.'’ A few days later the user searched on “true contractions,'’ then did an “inmate search,'’ which led to the Illinois Department of Corrections. Later in the month, the user searched for “bedbugs'’ and “matress sets in illinois.'’

What this means is the Big Brother most certainly is watching and will prosecute offenders. It doesn’t mean that every search will lead to an investigation, but use some common sense and stay with in the legal guidelines of the laws.

Three Ways You Can Be Tracked Online

IP ADDRESS
Each time you access the Internet, you are assigned a string of numbers identifying your machine. The numbers are kept from 30 days to seven years.

REGISTRATION
You create an account with a log-on and a password. When you log on, companies can also cross-reference cookies and IP addresses with your account.

COOKIE
A string of characters is saved on your computer’s hard drive so that a Web site can identify you, via your browser, each time you return to the site.

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