People use Google and Yahoo! throughout their daily lives – they need to know how to get from point a to b, need to find ecommerce sites, need to search friends’ blogs, need to learn how to cook fish, and have (generally) grown used to having the equivalent of electronic encyclopedias at their fingertips at all times. I’m not going to bother addressing concerns that this might be detrimentally affecting how people learn to retain information (i.e. as information is increasingly retained as search strings rather than as info-articles) but want to instead briefly consider how search intersects with privacy.

We hear about the need to protect our private information all of the time. ‘Shred your bank statements’, ‘be wary of online commerce sites’, ‘never share personal information on the ‘net’, and other proclamations of wisdom are uttered in print and video on a regular basis which are, in most cases, completely ignored. Proponents of the commercialization of privacy use this as definitive proof that citizens really don’t care about their privacy like they did in days gone past – people are willing to give up their names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information to receive services that they want. In light of this regulators should just butt out – the market has spoken!

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