Consumer Group Calls on Google to Offer Zero Personal Data Retention Policy

Google should offer users of its search engine the ability to leave no personal data on the Internet giant's servers, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Consumer Watchdog say and are asking for a meeting with Google's chairman to discuss the group's privacy concerns.

In a letter to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court and policy advocate John Simpson noted that the search engine Ask.com offers the ability for users' personal data to be removed almost immediately from its servers with its AskEraser service. "We call on you to offer Google's users such a clearly identifiable 'opt out' function on its search engine that is essentially a zero personal data retention policy."

During a question and answer period at a speech in Washington, DC, Schmidt told Simpson that he was "sympathetic" to the group's privacy concerns and told him to arrange a meeting "off line" rather than in front of 200 people, the consumer group says. An online video of that exchange is available.

The letter to Google came after the announcement this week by its rival Yahoo! that it will anonymize personal data it retains after only 90 days. Google currently keeps the data for nine months. European privacy officials have suggested a six-month standard, a limit that Microsoft said it would adopt if all search engine companies adopt the standard.

"This is really about choice," says Simpson. "People should have the right to choose what they do with their personal data and if they provide it all."

To guarantee privacy, Consumer Watchdog says, users need: 1) control over their private data; 2) transparency about how their data is gathered and used; and 3) the right to give informed consent through "opt in" functions, rather than having to sift through pages in order to even locate the "opt out" function, or in its absence, a clearly identifiable and accessible "opt out."

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Study shows Google Favored Over Other Search Engines by Webmasters

Web site policy makers who use robots.txt files as gatekeepers to specify what is open and what is off limits to Web crawlers have a bias that favors Google over other search engines, say Penn State researchers whose study of more than 7,500 Web sites revealed Google’s advantage.

That finding was surprising, says C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engine—BotSeer—for the study.

“We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong correlation between the robots favored and the search engines’ market share,” says Giles of Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

Robots.txt files are not an official standard, but by informal agreement, they regulate Web crawlers—also known as “spiders” and “bots”—which mine the Web 24/7 for everything from the latest news to e-mail addresses. Web policy makers use the files found in a Web site’s directory to restrict crawler access to non-public information. Robots.txt files also are used to reduce server load which can result in denial of service and shut down Web sites. But some Web policy makers and administrators are writing robots.txt files which are not uniformly blocking access.

Instead, those robots.txt files give access to Google, Yahoo and MSN while restricting other search engines, the researchers learned.

As an example, some U.S. government sites favor Google’s bot—Googlebot—followed by Yahoo and MSN, according to the researchers.

While the study doesn’t include explanations for why Web policy makers have opted to favor Google, the researchers know the choice was made consciously. Not using a robots.txt file gives all robots equal access to a Web site.

“Robots.txt files are written by Web policy makers and administrators who have to intentionally specify Google as the favored search engine,” Giles says.

That finding is described in a paper, “Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robots.txt,” given at the recent 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence in Silicon Valley. Besides Giles, the authors include Yang Sun and Ziming Zhuang, IST graduate students, and Isaac Councill, an IST post-doctoral scholar.

Not every site has a robots.txt file although the number is growing. Of the 7,500 sites analyzed by the researchers, about four in 10 had a robots.txt file—up from less than 1 in 10 in 1996.
That growth, which the researchers anticipate will continue, was one reason for the study.

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Branding Matters -- Even When Searching

Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

The queries included “camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music.”

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

“Given that there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same score,” says Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. “Some emotional branding is having an effect here.” Jansen and co-author, Mimi Zhang, an IST graduate student, detailed the study in a paper, “The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results,” at the recent Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, Calif.
The researchers were motivated to understand why Web users gravitate toward a handful of search engines when there are about 4,000 search engines that have similar technologies and similar interfaces. The performance -- defined as the ratio of relevant documents to the total number returned at some point in the results listing -- of those search engines also is practically the same.

To determine each engine's “performance,” participants rated the returned results on a three-
point scale: very relevant, somewhat relevant, and not relevant. After averaging the scores, the researcher determined an average -- about 36 percent of all results were judged relevant to the query.

The researchers then looked at each engine’s “score” to determine whether it fell above or below the average.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen says he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top. Its total scores were 15 percent above the average for the four queries while Google’s total scores were just 0.7 percent above the average. Future research will consider whether participants “carried over” satisfaction with other products when ranking search engines, Jansen says.

AI2RS, the search engine created in-house with no brand-name recognition, fared the worst. The researchers calculated its average precision rating as 10 percent below the average although AI2RS had the highest score when the query was “laser removal.”

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