Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

users behavior” and found that “[...] when privacy policy comparison information is
readily available, individuals may be willing to seek out more privacy friendly web sites
and perhaps even pay a premium for privacy depending on the nature of the items to
be purchased” [Gid06].
2.3.3. Search engines
When it comes to search engines, privacy plays an important role because for Internet
users they are a vital part of their daily routine. In this context the threat to privacy
shows different characteristics:
• Personalization and customization as already described in the sections above
• Creation of user profiles for improving search quality
• General data mining capabilities of search engines
The question of personalization and customization has already been discussed above,
based on the example of iGoogle. However, there are more threats to privacy when it
comes to the usage of search engines. One such threat is the creation of user profiles
for improving search quality. [Xu07] describes an experiment where it was shown that
providing personal, sensitive data improves the quality of search results. This is due to
the fact that by providing information about one’s preferences or other characteristics
the search engine is able to filter unsuitable search results. If users are male and under
30 years of age for example and they provide this information, they will probably get
better search results if searching for swimsuits simply because the search engine can filter
out all websites which provide information about female swimsuits. Once provided, this
information is probably stored for an undetermined amount of time. However, users are
able to deny such information if they want to.
Despite creating user-profiles, there is also another technology which, if mis-used, can
pose a threat to privacy called data mining. [Han01] defines data mining as “the analysis
of [...] observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships and to summarize the
data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the data owner”. In the
case of search engines this leads to incidents such as the scandal where AOL published
a database of anonymised search records for scientific use. Unfortunately, they were not
used for scientific purposes only which, shortly after the publication, led to whole user
profiles being published on the Internet [CNT06]. Although such big incidents rarely
occur, they clearly highlight the capabilities of search engines to collect the data of its
users and, once processed and interpreted, how such data can be abused. However,
these threats are not only applicable for the actual users of search engines, but also
for everyone who published content on the Internet without proper knowledge of its
technologies such as web-crawlers 3 . These web-crawlers collect data by indexing billions
of websites if not explicitly locked out from the website. Over time, search engines can
3 Web-crawlers are programs sent by search engines to “crawl” from website to website to index them
and hence make them available in the database of a search engine
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