Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
"The Working Party will deal with search engines in general and scrutinise their activities from a data protection point of view, because this issue affects an ever growing number of users," officials announced.
Search engines operated by Microsoft and Yahoo seem likely to come under the working party's microscope.
Google recently responded to pressure from the working party by agreeing to anonymise stored searches after 18 months rather than its previous practice of 18-24 months.
The storage of large amounts of data about users (search histories, use of mapping services, emails, instant messages and so on) potentially allows companies to deliver better services to individuals. If someone regularly swaps recipes including Spam via email, then their web searches for 'spam' are likely to concern the tinned meat rather than unsolicited messages.
The downside is the potential for misuse, for example by allowing access to this information by other companies or government agencies.
Whether the search engine companies' use of the accumulated data to more precisely target advertising helps or hinders users is less clear cut, but it is arguably not, in itself, a privacy issue.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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