More Private than thou?

We predicted last year that 2007 would be the year that the Trust / Identity / Privacy issue hit the mainstream, and the last week or so has seen an interesting situation - the emergence of the "more private than thou" play as a differentiator.

Google has been resisting anonymising (or in any way limiting really) its ability to trawl the behavioural data of its user base, but was earlier this year (March) dragged to a position where it agreed that after 18 months it would do so, and earlier this month agreed to limiting cookie lifespan to 2 years after usage of Google stopped. That this is unimpressive is best expressed today in an FT article asking Google to please consider doing no evil, as it says on the tin.

However. this has also opened up the very interesting opportunity for Google to be sideswiped by less evil competition. Ask.com and Yahoo now have a mere 13 months stored individual data

Last week Ask.com went for the ability to erase the trace of a search, and now Microsoft is allowing people to toggle the privacy of their searches (see the New York Times Article)

(Update - A similar view has been put up here on Search Engine Journal)

However, we expect the pressure to continue, as people become increasingly aware (i) how intrusive these systems can be and (ii) they are creating value that others are taking off the table.

So where will it all end?

We suspect that the more the players try to vertically integrate the value chain, the more that legislative bodies will take an interest. Google by its sheer size is already exciting interest

But if you asked the average person to toggle for:

(i) erase vs record a Search
(ii) anonymise v personalise your Search results

...then we would hypothesize that a rapidly growing majority would go for these, and to offer (more intrusive) others one would need to "incentivise" the user. In other words, we suspect that the arms race to "do the least evil" will continue for quite a while.

Where this leaves a player that makes all its money from targeted Ads is an interesting question, so one can expect players like Microsoft or Yahoo to push this quite a bit harder yet.

Postscript...noted that both the WSJ and FT picked up this story...a meme of the times !