aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Logging IP addresses. So what?

Xeni points to Adam Fields explanation of why it matters that search engines log IP addresses. I’ve read it; if you’re interested you should too. It hasn’t changed my thinking about the Google subpoena.

I’m glad we’re now on to defining what “personally identifying information” is. Google and the other search engines claim that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information. I don’t have a problem with that. I understand that my IP address may have been with me for a good long while and I know that they can match it to the name and billing information on my ISP account. Still I say, so what?

I’m not claiming expertise in all of the areas that come together here. Rather, I’d like to identify with the average person using the Internet and get to what a reasonable expectation of privacy might be. The model I’ll look to for that comparison is the telephone and the comparison I’ll make is to the phone number. I’d like the same expectation of privacy using the Internet as I have using the telephone, and absent any contrary information I’ll assume that would suffice for the average Internet user.

When I call someone, the phone company logs that call. Is that “personally identifying information?” It is a darned good clue that narrows down the range of folks it possibly might be, but in and of itself and all by itself, it doesn’t identify me. The same goes for the IP address. I do acknowledge that the phone company doesn’t collect an equivalent to search terms, but it does collect significant information including incoming and outgoing calls, the length of those calls and, for cell phones, location information.

Now if our claim is that the vast majority of folks using the Internet think it is more anonymous than it actually turns out to be, and that this Google incident has brought attention to that, well swell. But what I see and hear from people all around me is a broad public misunderstanding, a belief that in fact the Google privacy invasion is much greater than it is.

It’s my belief that this kind of confusion gets in the way of our focus on, and building support for, the important privacy issues that are worth worrying about.