TechDirt points to a piece at The Technology Liberation Front about legislation considered in my home state of California:
…the California Initiative For Internet Privacy (CIFIP) is turning up the heat on Google and other search engine provides with threats of legislative campaigns or a push for a ballot initiative regulating data collection.
When it comes to the contentious issue of data retention, search companies are basically damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That is, if they DO collect / retain search terms and records, the privacy zealots go crazy and run to Rep. Ed Markey (or, in this case, California legislators) and ask for new laws strictly limiting what can be collected / retained.
On the other hand, if they DO NOT collect / retain any of this info, then the “law and order” / “we must protect the children” crowd in Congress and state AG offices start breathing fire down their necks and demand *mandatory* data preservation / retention, potentially for lengthy periods of time (and for quite a bit of information).