[Sigia-l] Will she be fired?

[Laurie Gray]

I am catching up on my backlog of emails...

I know that the entire world is going this way, (Google browses my
mail) but this really makes me uncomfortable because of the privacy
issues. How many of us have client- or company-confidential
information on our machines? I'm not sure that I want a third party
such as Microsoft to be able to cull through that information in order
to provide me with "targeted" search results, because you KNOW that
this information will then be provided ("anonymously", of course) to
advertisers who will then provide you with ads that are targeted to
these keywords. What would happen to confidentiality?

I'm thinking if she loses her job that is totally OK by me, if they're
going to be browsing through my hard drive at random. While it's fine,
on one level I guess, for Google to browse my mail and target ads to
me based on my messages, the control remains in MY HANDS as to whether
or not I use my Gmail account for transmission of confidential
information. It seems like with the Microsoft setup, I would lose that
ability - unless, of course, Microsoft came up with a good way for me
to hide that information from their view - a virtual "safe" of sorts,
where I could trigger privacy settings for a portion of my directory
tree that would make it appear completely intact to me but appear
invisible to their "targeted internal searching" engines (and their
subsequent reporting systems).

So this brings up a question...where do you see the tipping point
being between advertiser targeted searching and individual user
privacy? I suspect I probably fall on the conservative side as I could
live without targeted advertising entirely, but somebody somewhere
must like it and use it because it keeps growing. Thoughts? Do you see
a backlash occurring? If so, when/where/under what circumstances do
you see that happening?

Laurie

On 3/7/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, has built a tool to help
> determine relevance called Personalized Search. It pulls together several
> hundred results and then compares them with the index that Windows users can
> build of the documents on their hard drives, a feature called Desktop
> Search.
>
> She demonstrated the effectiveness of the program by searching for Michael
> Jordan. By culling through local information on her hard drive, the program
> was able to discern that she was interested in finding the Michael Jordan
> who is the machine-learning expert at the University of California,
> Berkeley, not the basketball player.
>
> Search in the future will look nothing like today¹s simple search engine
> interfaces, she said, adding, ³If in 10 years we are still using a
> rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.²
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/business/07soft.html>
>
> ----
> Ziya
>
> Heterogeneity happens.
>
>
>
>
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