In business, your clients trust is everything. Trust is something hard to build, but once lost, it’s really hard to recover. If you lose your client’s trust you lose everything.There have been two headlines that have hit the news last week.
First Google’s refusal to allow the Feds access its search records.
Second Yahoo and MSN’s compliance with the Feds.
Google has discredited its competitors by one lawsuit.
At the end of the week MSN was doing some damage control. After all, it doesn’t look that great if you allow access to your clients’ data to third party without any fight.
Trust is everything.
MSN Response:
“With this data you:
CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both “TERM A” and “TERM B”.”
Here are some of the comments left by people
“What if the Government believes that some of the queries they are now in posession of, which I assume they would otherwise only have been able to come into posession of via an authorised warrant, are worthy of further investigation?
Will MSN then release IP and user information? They will if they are compelled to do so as part of any criminal court case. If so, it can be shown that the direct cause of this was the release of the initial query data.”
“I WILL NEVER EVER USE A US-BASED SEARCH ENGINE AGAIN. This is not because you did something wrong in this case, it is because incidents like this make me feel less and less safe disclosing my personal info to any system that is within US jurisdiction.”
“The government is not the boogy man and as a parent I appreciate the intent of the DOJ data gathering attempt.”
“Does MSN Search actually record IPs with each search string? In other words, is there any sort of electronic or paper trail for each search that ever could be subpoenaed? Because whether or not that information is requested in this subpoena, if it is available at all, there’s a chance that it someday could be requested, and that’s a nightmare waiting to happen. ”
“No matter how you spin it, handing this information over to the US Government looses MS serious trust points. How can you seriously talk about trustworthy computing when you hand over this information without at least a fight or without being more honest to your customers up front? You’ve had since last summer to make a stand, yet it only happens as a PR response to the well deserved bad publicity MS is getting.”
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