Privacy or Data, a Convenient False Dichotomy

&gt; Let us start with the need for data, going straight to the point: one cannot build a competitive search without data collected from people.<p>Google had a very good search engine before they started to collect data from everyone, not after.<p>I don&#x27;t have a metric to decide whether the search results from google got better or worse over the years. Subjectively and for me personally, they&#x27;ve gotten worse. And I&#x27;m not the only one who thinks this. I could be (and probably am) wrong, but I think the more personal data a search engine has, the worse the results.<p>When I think about it in that way, it makes senses why it has gotten worse. The search engine pays more attention to the data it think it has collected from me and how it relates to advertisers, etc... instead of paying attention to the actual words I wrote in the query.

The question is why do companies even have to see our data? In the old days of the internet universities and government institutions dealt with data, the companies were only there to provide the hardware.

While the approach mentioned in this article seems interesting, there&#x27;s multiple other approaches to mitigate privacy issues in data collection, cryptographic approaches like homomorphic encryption or decentralized approaches like federated learning. Still wonder what is the differentiation of this approach from the others.

seems to be like day 2 of the advent.<p>from day 1: The world needs more search engines [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.0x65.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019-12-01&#x2F;the-world-needs-cliqz-the-world-needs-more-search-engines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.0x65.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019-12-01&#x2F;the-world-needs-cliqz-t...</a>

There should be a way to store data so that aggregate queries like &quot;count how many different people are in a given location&quot; can be answered without compromising individual privacy. Approaches like k-anonymity or L-diversity come to mind<p>The problem is that there is no incentive for businesses to do so. Even regulations like GDPR &amp; CCPA mostly don&#x27;t touch upon the privacy of first-party data. As long as you give an option to delete the data (which often is hard to implement), you don&#x27;t have to do anything more.