There are two talks related with search or search personalization.
One is a talk about search privacy, by Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a professor at CMU.
The other is a talk about Secure Personalization: Towards Trustworthy Recommender Systems, by Dr. Bamshad Mobasher, a professor at Depaul.
Today, I got to know that Findory, a personalized news website, “rides into the sunset“. It is a sad news. But I believe that personalization technology will succeed somewhere in the real-world applications.
I found that there is a talk by Dr. Alfred Kobsa, a professor at UCI. The title of the talk is Privacy-Enhanced Personalization. It should be very relevant to my thesis research on privacy-preserving personalized search.
From Greg Linden’s blog, I got to know Susan gave a personalized search talk at Yahoo! Research. Video of the talk is available at Yahoo! Video. Susan will also come to the town on Mar 26, 2007 and give a talk on Information Retrieval in Context.
In June 2006, US ACM published a recommendation policy on privacy on ACM website (Visit http://www.acm.org/usacm/Issues/Privacy.htm for the content). To strike a balance between individual privacy protection and valid governmental and commercial usage, ACM recommends minimization, consent, openness, access, accuracy, security, and accountability.
In August 2006, there was AOL search log incident. Now, the search engine has become an indispensable tool for people in daily life. However, many people may not be aware that search engines actually store a lot of personal information and can potentially reveal a gamut of individuals’ private lives such as medical history and hobbies. I think compared with recommendations of ACM, search engine companies have a long way to go. For example, people currently virtually have no access to search engine logs, although no personal identity is stored at the search engine side. Moreover, the search engine logs probably are stored at search engine data servers indefinitely.
Some search engines such as Google Personalized have implemented personalized search functionality, some interfaces are provided for the user to modify these data. For example, Google let users delete search history entries one by one. But it is still not convenient for users. For example, users can not remove several entries in a batch mode.
