The New Standard for Search Privacy

There are really only two legal/ethical issues that are regularly lodged against search engines: copyrights and privacy. The copyright debate has taken its way to courts across the world and has resulted in several technologies which empower webmasters to protect their copyrighted information. No fewer than 4 separate standards: robots.txt, nocache, noindex, and nofollow, allow webmasters to opt-out of indexing, caching, and other search engine activites which may violate or endanger their copyright.

How many standards exist to protect privacy? Until today, none.

I am proud to introduce #privacy (http://www.poundprivacy.org), the new search standard for privacy. The concept is fairly simple: searchers should be able to opt out of tracking mechanisms when they append the term #privacy at the end of a query.

The simple truth is this: companies like Google cannot reconcile their “do no evil” mottos with their current positions on privacy. If you believe that a standard for search privacy should be created, please visit http://www.poundprivacy.org to read up on how you can help.

It is time that the search engines stop relying on legal teams and privacy policy loopholes to defend themselves, and start empowering their users to protect their own privacy.

*Note: Delivos at http://www.seohelp.org pointed out that censorship is also an important issue to be noted.

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