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March 25, 2008
Privacy-Minded Search With PrivacyFinder
The EFF’s Peter Eckersley writes about PrivacyFinder, a Google/Yahoo front-end has a good data retention policy and can report on the privacy policies of the sites that turn up in results:
“… it’s exciting to report that one small search engine is experimenting with ways to be an aide, rather than a threat, to privacy. PrivacyFinder is a research project at the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (full disclosure: Lorrie Cranor, who heads the lab, is also on the EFF Board). It offers an interface to Yahoo! and Google, but with two notable improvements: an excellent logging/data retention policy, and a feature that shows the user information about sites’ privacy policies along with the search results. That way, if two sites offer the same service but one of them is better from a privacy point of view, the user will see that quickly. The PrivacyFinder researchers tell us they’ve observed that people will, for instance, pay more for an item from an online store if they can see that it has an excellent privacy policy.
“PrivacyFinder seems to be making productive use of P3P, an old privacy standard that has, in many other respects, fallen short of expectations. If you run a search on the site, you can quickly see when one result matches your standards and others don’t.
“Privacyfinder’s logging policy is amongst the best in the industry (Ixquick is also first-rate). Privacyfinder only keeps search records for a week, unless the user explicitly opts in to being tracked. Because the CMU Laboratory wants to do research on the use of search engines, it’s offering prizes for people who are willing to be tracked for research purposes. That’s the way we like to see it done.”
I’m not endorsing it because I only just read about it, but I’m definitely going to spend some time looking at it this week.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 6:22 PM | Add Comment
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