EU widens search engine probe

Stephen Withers
Friday, 22 June 2007 03:02

Your IT - Home IT

The European Union's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party is set for a wider investigation of search engine privacy practices.

"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.