A9.com search engine.

The consequences on your privacy

I just found a piece of news on Future Now blog that caught my attention. This talk about the new start-up of Amazon.com. This is a new kind a search engine. Basically it’s a sort of wrapper on other search engine, like google, with cool new features. You can get more information about the service here. Personally, I find these features really cool and interesting. You can use your Amazon account to log in at A9.com without any problem. Wow, thank Amazon for such cool things!

After a couple of minutes, I thought about it and I find that this cannot be done by magic. I remembered all books that Amazon proposed me when I logged in with my personal account, they were most of the time really interesting. Then I thought that this would probably be the same thing with the A9 search engine. There is the result of my little research, some tips and comments for your privacy about this search engine of a new kind. Personally I’m a big customer at Amazon, I buy approximately 30 to 40 books by years on there website. However, I’ll not use the A9 search engine because I don’t want that Amazon know not only my customer habits of reading but also all other subjects that I search for on the internet. I can deal with the fact that Amazon.com uses my customer habits to propose me interesting new books. I can deal with this because this can point me out some books that I never think of before. However, I don’t want that they propose me many others things. I need to control the pub that popup in my view. It’s what I do by doing the choice of not using this new search engine.

First, you need to know that they collect four type of information: [Source]

·         Information You Give Us: We receive and store any information you enter on our Web site or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features. We use the information that you provide for such purposes as customizing the site for you, improving the site, responding to your requests, and communicating with you.

·         Automatic Information: We receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with us. For example, like many Web sites, we use cookies, and we obtain certain types of information when your Web browser accesses A9.com. If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you.

·         E-mail Communications: To help us make e-mails more useful and interesting, we often receive a confirmation when you open e-mail from A9.com if your computer supports such capabilities.

·         Information from Other Sources: For reasons such as improving personalization of our service, we might receive information about you from other sources and add it to our information.

What can be freaky are the definitions of “Information You Give Us” and “Automatic Information”:

·         Information You Give Us: You provide most such information when you use A9.com to search or otherwise communicate with us. For example, you provide information when you enter search terms; set bookmarks; download and use our toolbar; communicate with us by phone, e-mail, or otherwise; and employ our other services. As a result of those actions, you might supply us with personally identifiable information or information about things that interest you.

·         Automatic Information: Examples of the information we collect and analyze include the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, and platform; the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time; cookie number; and pages you viewed or searched for.

As you can read, they store many information about you and your search habits. It can be freaky. This information is gold. They have your entire profile. The have your name, your address, you postal code, your buying habits and your searching habits. If this information is not gold, what is it then?

Another thing is that this information can be accessible not just by Amazon but also by some type of police because “[they] release account and other personal information when [they] believe release is appropriate to comply with the law”.

You can always use the generic.A9.com server. They are not collecting any information on you. The only problem is that you don’t have access to the cool features. Instead, use Google; it’ll be more productive I think.

You can use the service if you can deal with the possible risks. The only thing that I’ll tell you is: be aware of your privacy on the internet. This is just an example among many others.