GOOGLE RESPONDED YESTERDAY to a European report which reproached search engines for holding on to people’s personal details for any longer than six months. Google, which stores user data for up to 18 months, defended itself by claiming the policy was necessary to improve the quality and experience of Web surfing.

The report, entitled “Opinion on data protection issues related to search engines”, was compiled by a group calling itself “Article 29 Working Party”, and puts forward a whole host of suggestions on how to better ensure the protection of Europeans’ data, in all that pertains to Web Search.

Highly critical of what they see as data hoarding, the report’s authors call on the search engines to do more to inform users about their policies on data collection and suggest that cookies should expire after six months.

The search engines claim that cookies, small chunks of text that detail the various comings and goings of surfers to different Web sites, have long been used to better a user’s experience (remembering a user on a commercial website for instance), but it is also known that they have been extensively used by advertisers who want to track people’s web habits more accurately. It is these cookies that have been getting privacy organisations hot and bothered lately, due to the fact that they can potentially track a surfer’s every online move and make that information available to the highest bidder.

But in his bog, Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, took issue with the report, and argued that the data collection only made the Internet more comfortable and easy to use. He also slammed the report’s suggestions that a person’s IP address should be private information, noting that the issue was a complicated one as ISP’s sometimes gave out the same IP to several different users and saying “we believe that whether or not an IP address is personal data depends on how the data is being used".

Google feels it has already come some way in upping their privacy settings. In March, the search engine giant announced plans to begin anonymising the last eight bits of users’ IP addresses, unless it had been legally ordered not to. Also, last month, the company revealed that instead of setting web search cookie to expire in 2038, it would expire them after only 18 months, something the Article 29 Working Party don’t see as being good enough.

The smaller search engine Ask.com was the first major search engine that recently announced its plans to allow people to perform anonymous Web searches and request that the search engine not store their personal data.

Apparently though, Google is reluctant to let go. µ

L’Inq
The Article 29 Working Party report

Peter Fleischer’s blog

See Also
Ask Anonymises search history