Yahoo has announced that it will anonymise search records after 90 days and remove any personally identifiable connection to searches.

Far short of what could be achieved, the Yahoo announcement is in an effort to stave off legislation in the US and Eu which would probably have even stricter provisions. Yahoo certainly increases pressure on Google (9 months) and Microsoft (18 months).

It' is nevertheless a positive step from Yahoo.

The internet giants haven't yet realised how they can utilise all the marketing and personalisation data to the n'th degree and face little opposition from even the most ardent privacy advocates.

It is still early days for the internet, sort of like the wild west and we haven't yet seen any really great internet companies with anything likely to see them leading for the long term.

There is a way to make the internet safer for billions of people and allow them the privacy and freedom of speech and ideas they deserve while providing marketers with plenty of information to improve their business processes. Whoever thought clicks or views was a real measure of advertising effectiveness overlooked the lessons of TV. The real measure is in whether they actually buy your product as a result of your advertisement. I'd only be paying for real measurements - actual purchases and I'd be going on my First Data transaction figures, not Nielsen or Google's. That model is feasible for both the broadcast media and the internet. Businesses will soon wake up and demand it.

With click fraud rings working round the clock and a goodly portion of websurfers disabling or clearing cookies the click 'data' is only an illusion anyway, and most companies are probably wasting time studying it. Keep it simple, pay for sales, you don't pay salesmen until the sale is closed and the money is in the bank, what is a click worth? - nothing. I have been 'surfing' the net since before it was the net and I have clicked on millions of things and hardly ever bought a thing from the internet. How do I get help/support/warranty? I don't even really know who I'm buying from or whether the site is a fake or they just popped up yesterday or whether they have sold to a million customers and an independent third party can prove it.

I don't care if I'm the first customer down the street at the new shop, at least he'll likely be there tomorrow, and I can always hang around and complain if things go wrong. Not so with the net.

Why, because these big internet companies are doing everything in a half-assed way, and have been flying by the seat of their pants, mostly just lucky that the net was such a big bright shiny new thing. Well it has lost some of it's gloss and it's starting to annoy us in the real world and thoise times of easy money and unimaginable growth are gone, certainly in it's present form.

Rather thinking short term and unrealistically taking what you want (every scrap of consumer information), try thinking about giving the consumers what they want, security and privacy, and they'll embrace it's use in every aspect of their lives.

Just because we transact and interact at distance doesn't mean we don't want to 'know' and 'trust' the person or institution on the other end. We don't necessarily want to share all or any of our personal information with them, especially with the current level of risk and lack of a practical identity structure.

We also don't want them getting together and combining all their knowledge about us or sell it to those who would seek to manipulate our spending or even political and religious views, nor to monitor our behaviour for whatever allegedly altruistic reasons (already well and truly happening). Why wouldn't marketers and site owners eventually decide to profile their perfect customer and restrict access and services to anyone not in that demographic? ie. Don't list in the results of a google search to anyone who doesn't fit our perfect customer profile, we won't pay for clicks that are from Zelda in Moldavia, because we know she can't afford a Ferrari. There are of course many much more sinister scenarios. Fraudsters getting hold of consumer profiles would be able to use the data achieve dangerous success rates, and they'll get it.

People want to interact safely. Currently this means with privacy and security. We can't afford to reveal personal information, there are just too many others who would do evil with it.

In a perfect world, we'd be safe to reveal our identities and personal details to whomever we choose and we'd still be safe. The world is far from perfect just yet.

Any internet company that delivers what is possible, both privacy and security, will get the trust to allow the use of limitless anonymised internet behaviour for market intelligence the 'betterment' of us all, but that won't include anyone being able to track or manipulate anyone else using the internet. The same could be true for all broadcast and narrowcast media.

If we think ID theft is an issue now, what are we to expect in the next decade if we don't have a radical rethink on they way we interact as customers and with customer? It hardly seems a way to build loyalty, spying on your customers every move. It is very much different than knowing and servicing your customers, and just because the internet is used and legislated mostly by those who don't understand the ramifications of what is possible, doesn't mean that using it as a spying tool is a good idea. Eventually it will come back to bite you, and the value of your business will reflect the consumers' displeasure and illustrate the speed at which a company or product can lose favour in the blink of an eye.

The search engines are ultimately responsible for the hackers and fraudsters, and enable them to find either your personal data, or more about someone who has your data, so they can target them. Of course search engines can't censor the net, but they need to pay the piper eventually, the free ride won't last forever, unless they contribute to making the net a safer place. The alternative is those idiots who think they can censor the net and the search engines who think they can profit by helping do it.

Those companies that participate in that course of action have even less of a future.

I'd predict that the value of the big internet companies is ultimately linked to how little identifible personal data they hold, rather than how much. They all have plenty of downside right now.