Web history backends and privacy issues

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi smart people and lawyers,
	Beagle contains 3 web history backends who index all the web-pages that has 
been visited while beagled was running. Since it is supposed to index the 
visited web pages, there is no concept of "deleted/erased history" and so 
indexed items are never deleted. Even though history cant be deleted in real 
life, they can be in computers - browsers allow users to delete history. Add 
to this the fact that sometimes browsers cleans up history to save space.

So the question is: what should beagle do to the indexed web pages ?
Should they expire after some number of days ?
Should there be any correspondence between the actual history stored by the 
browser and the webpages stored in beagle index ?
(There are technical limitations in figuring out if a history deletion is due 
to periodic history cleanup or explicit user request).

I myself found that clearing IE cache didnt remove the browsed pages from 
GDS's index in an old version (2 years ago) but it could have changed now.
If some of you know how web history is handled is other desktop search apps 
please let me know. Any other comments, suggestions are welcome too. Till 
then, if you are afraid someone might try to find visited webpages even 
though you explicitly removed them from the browser's history, disable the 
web history backends. But again, you have nothing to hide - do you ;-) ?

- dBera

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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user