In a move that may surprise many doom-sayers (like me) who fret about Google, Gmail and privacy, the search engine company has refused a request from the US Department of Justice for information about the search habits of Google users.

It’s important to recognise that the DoJ only asked for “de-identified” data, aggregated statistics that cannot be linked to individual users. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL all happily complied with the request.

But Google refused, partly because it fears turning the information over will create the public perception that Google doesn’t protect the privacy of its users.

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post has written a very interesting article in response on what exactly Google does know about individual users. Or you could browse the 934 hits on the story at Google News.

In further Google-realated privacy news, Gmail has introduced a more visible delete button. This gives users the impression that they can delete emails from the Gmail system.

Certainly the button removes the messages from the web interface, but whether it really means that they have gone, or whether they lurk around in Google’s massive data collection system is another matter. Gmail’s privacy statement is not clear about that.

Whoops, there I go again….

Tags: AOL, delete button, email, GMAIL, Google, MSN, privacy, privacy statement, search habits, Yahoo

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This entry was posted on Sunday, 22nd January, 2006 at 12:52 am and is filed under Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.