With everyone out there working to create a search engine for all seasons, let’s not forget about the continued concerns about the potential for privacy issues.

At the center of the square off over the access to private personal data online — a much publicized debate that extends from Beijing to Washington — stands an uncertain arbiter: the search engine.

The companies that operate the most popular search engines — Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — are making decisions about how the information they collect about user behavior should be protected, in some cases from the eyes of governments that want to take a closer look but lack a clear legal right to do so.

“Search engines are the future of [that] debate,” says Timothy Wu, a Columbia Law School professor specializing in telecommunications law, copyright, and international trade. “Questions about policy ultimately are going to be handled by search engines — whether we live in a more or less government-controlled country.” Source: Information Week

[tags]search engines,privacy debate,telecommunications law,personal data[/tags]