Privacy Issues Brought by Search 2.0

The emergence of Web 2.0 has brought change to the way we retrieve information through the Internet. In the article "The externalities of search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets Web 2.0," Michael Zimmer mentions that search engines are now trying to achieve Search 2.0 capabilities (pg. 2). These capabilities consist of accessing an almost unlimited amount of information for the user and personalizing this information when retrieved by the user (Zimmer, 2008). In this article, Zimmer recognizes these two important qualities as the "perfect reach and perfect recall" (pg. 3).

These two key qualities of search 2.0 can be extremely beneficial to the user, but they do bring some baggage along. For search engines, such as Google, obtaining this customized aspect within search results requires them to know some personal information about the user (Zimmer, 2008). As mentioned by Zimmer, these search engines do this by recognizing you as a certain IP address. They then tag information, such as browsing history and demographics to achieve their goal of personalization (pg. 3). The amount of information that search engines can obtain is the main worry of the search 2.0 technology. In the rest of this article, Zimmer gets into this personal information flaw and recognizes that it can be used by employers and even the government to pry into people's personal lives (pg. 6).

This article was quite concerning to me and helped me realized in more depth, on how vulnerable the Internet can make you. Zimmer mentions that the search engines keep this flaw of search 2.0 pretty well hidden (pg. 7). I agree with this, as I was one of the many who didn't know the true complications of this issue. I didn't realize that by having a GMAIL account, Google can take your demographic information and use this to personalize searches. The fact that they can hand over emails and this personal information to the government is without a doubt a privacy breach (Zimmer, 2008). I believe it shouldn't be possible for a search engine or company to have that amount of power in their hands. The fact is that these companies do have this information and it should be controlled. Laws need to be passed that regulate the flow of user's personal information and a remedy needs to be put in place. As mentioned by Zimmer, I agree that the cure of this privacy problem should consist of giving users the option to what information is accessed by these companies and the search engines (pg. 8). If this is not dealt with, the possibility of a bigger privacy issue could be on the horizon.

Bibliography

1. Zimmer, Michael. (2008). The externalities of search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets Web 2.0. First Monday, 13. Retrieved August 21, 2008 from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944.