Who knows what you search for online?

This is, I would suggest, perhaps the biggest privacy issue of the day. I have lost count of the number of press releases, leads, emails and telephone calls that have come my way this year regarding how search engines treat the data you enter when performing a search. Be it the act of serving up contextual advertising, through to archiving of search strings (and requests for access to those archives from law enforcement agencies) and even ‘accidental’ publishing of research databases such as the recent AOL debacle. Although there is some merit in the argument that if you are not searching for anything illegal then you have nothing to worry about, there is much more merit in the ‘what has it got to do with anyone else’ one.