Americans Worry Over Search Engine Privacy

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 12, 6:28AM EDT

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Surveys of Americans have frequently said they do not want the owners of websites to “spy” on these to determine their habits and use those to target ads. A series of research from The Wall Street Journal reported that has not stopped websites from the practice. The concern has moved from PCs to mobile devices, which can track, in addition to online preferences, the locations of smartphone users.

More research from Pew says that Americans do not favor the collection of their personal data, particularly if firms like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) use it to target search ads. These same people do not mind if the data collection helps make future search results more relevant. In other words, they want the best results of data collection, but not any invasion of privacy.

The data from “Pew Internet & American Life Project” shows:

65% say… It’s a BAD thing if a search engine collected information about your searches and then used it to rank your future search results, because it may limit the information you get online and what search results you see

29% say… It’s a GOOD thing if a search engine collected information about your searches and then used it to rank your future search results, because it gives you results that are more relevant to you

The respondents are naive enough to believe that search engines can afford to make advance technology to help them without using the same technology to gain revenue from so that this process can be improved

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.