be careful what you wish (search) for

I don’t want to be alarmist and get people worried, but this article got me a little concerned about our privacy when we perform web searches. There are very few privacy laws protecting your search history from being subpoenaed by the government or any criminal case. This includes Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo and others. So if you’re doing searches like “How to make a car bomb”… um… do it from a cyber cafe, not from your computer.

For those of you whose searches are not illegal, just embarrassing, don’t worry yet. But we should put pressure on Google and the others to delete users’ search histories after 30 days or so (ironically, AOL has the best policy on this. They delete all search history after 30 days already. Yeah, who woulda thunk it?)