When the European Union confronted Google over its data retention policies, some people - including Google’s own global privacy counsel - wondered why Yahoo, Microsoft, and a number of other companies were left alone. Now it appears that the EU is going to take a look at them, after all.
I’d like to direct a hat tip towards Barry Schwartz for this one, but the original source (as Schwartz notes) is Paul Meller of the IDG News Service. “European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy, after initially targeting Google Inc. last month,” Meller stated.
And though information is scarce, this isn’t hearsay or a rumor - Meller managed to get an interview with European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, who told him, “A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google’s rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long.”
Google’s leaders might get a laugh out of this (turnabout being fair play and all that), but they’d probably much rather the EU had just dropped the whole matter; a good deal of negative publicity followed the EU’s original interactions with Google.
Yahoo and Microsoft on the other hand . . . well, it’s not likely that they’re finding this the least bit humorous.
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Data Retention
Please take a moment to read the NMRC's newsletter on data retention at:
http://newmillenniumresearch.org/milestones/june2007.html
Data Retention
I found your post to be very interesting regarding how the EU is closely monitoring how all search engines use the Internet data they collect and whether the EU will impose shorter data retention times to protect individual’s privacy.
My organization the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC) recently explored the privacy and security concerns associated with data retention mandates in its online newsletter. The newsletter shares the views of Hance Haney, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and Peter Swire, a professor of law at the Ohio State University and a fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Here are the key points that they make:
Haney concluded that collecting users’ IP addresses would not stop criminals from connecting to public Wi-Fi access points as anonymous users. Even if these public hotspots required users to register, Haney explained that criminals would use residential wireless networks that are “frequently unsecured.”
Swire concluded that the US should continue to use the current data preservation law and not adopt a nationwide data retention mandate. Swire, however, said that the data preservation system must be improved to ensure that any sensitive government data collected by ISPs would not end up in the wrong hands and threaten our national security.
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