The Perfect Engine Vs. Personal Privacy

For today’s class, I was assigned to read “The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0” by Michael Zimmer. In his article he discusses the endless quest for the perfect search engine and how key components of Web 2.0 are contributing to this experiment. However, once you look deeper than the surface, one may realize that in order to receive this ‘perfect search engine’ you must give up your privacy on the World Wild Web.

In order to discover the perfect search engine there are two key components that are needed. As Zimmer states, “To attain such an omnipresent and omniscient ideal, search engines must have both “perfect reach” in order to provide access to all available information on the Web and “perfect recall” in order to deliver personalized and relevant results that are informed by who the searcher is.” (p.2) ‘Perfect reach’ gives web users the options to whatever they want on the web as they please by being able to access anything that is needed. ‘Perfect recall’ then “understands the searchers wants” and automatically understands what the searcher is looking for based on prior web encounters. (Zimmer, p.3) An example of this would be typing in a search of the word, ‘Mitsubishi’ and the computer knowing to return results of the less popular television set rather than the automobile made by the same company.

For these technologies to work properly, one’s web activity must be closely monitored in order to know what results to display. This is where the problem comes into play. By tracking a users activities on the internet they lose their personal privacy. They lose their privacy by having records created of what sites they visited, items that are being bought and even e-mails that are being read or written. With this vast technology of ‘perfect recall’ a user’s entire web history is netted into these technologies and the once private lives of web users now may be exploited at any time and are permanently kept on record.

After reading this article I now understand the key issues and concerns that are brought up regards to creating the perfect search engine. I feel that in order to accomplish this notion of the perfect search engine the user has to ask the question, “Is it worth giving up my privacy?” In response to this I feel that technology is only increasing, so there is nowhere else to turn besides taking part in this revolution of the perfect search engine.

From:
Zimmer, Michael. (2008). The externalities of search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets web 2.0. First Monday, 13. Retrieved August 21, 2008 from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944