It is very interesting that Information Week should be leading off this morning that they believe that Google should learn about privacy from Cuil. Cuil is the hot new alternative search engine that exploded, literally and figuratively onto the internet on Monday, and as the Uber hype starts working downwards, and Cuil stops getting the nod and notice from the tech bloggers community, other information starts creeping into the press about Cuil and its plans, policies, and other information that dives deeper into the general “I LOVE IT” campaign on Monday.
Have to admit through for a vanity search, Cuil worked great.
But now privacy becomes an issue, and something that in our hyper vigilant government run domestic spying program is probably not going to last all that long. The idea that Cuil does not keep logs, no IP addresses and no way of working out who is hitting their web site, there are two concerns here, one business, one personal.
From the business viewpoint, logs are the Holy Grail, we love them, we want them, marketing, sales, and management wants to know everything they can know about who is hitting their web sites. Eventually as Cuil grows, those logs become more and more important. That means they will eventually have to change to meet the needs/expectations of their own internal consumers. Plus it is a bit of a misnomer to think that they keep no logs, they do keep logs, they just don’t keep the same quality of information that other sites do, no IP addresses according to reports.
The other is civil, or personal, with no logs, it is fairly easy to think of them as the privacy loving folks, meaning I can now go surf for and search out things that can get me in to a lot of trouble. There are also going to be issues when they get requests from information from the domestic spying program that we currently live under. And this does nothing to keep the ISP and other downstream interception systems from knowing where you go, what you search for, and what you are viewing. The idea that people will be lulled by Cuil not keeping IP Addresses does not mean you are private, it means that Cuil does not keep anything, but your ISP is free to monitor in the name of marketing, bandwidth controls, and other arguments about it.
Lulling people at the Cuil site is one thing, but that does not mean that you are ever going to be anonymous when you surf on the internet. Cuil might care, but everyone else between you and Cuil does care, and pays attention to what you are looking at.
Something that Google should learn about? Maybe, but they are doing things differently and have developed a major dependence on the business intelligence that their logs generate. Without the logs, the Google Empire for Ads collapses overnight. Without logs, Google cannot respond to government requests for information, without logs, there is a lot of things that Google will suddenly find themselves in trouble for.
Then there are small issues like government regulations on logs, there are many, and many of them have flown under the wire and attention of technical bloggers. While the logs do not state yet that it is mandatory to keep IP addresses, some well meaning government official in the name of “think of the children” will come up with a rule or rider on some bill somewhere that logs must keep IP addresses. Then Cuil’s proposed competitive advantage is culled by government regulation. Keeps things interesting, but honestly, while this is an interesting idea, at some point, Cuil is going to run head long into our domestic spying program, and have to change their business model to accommodate.
