Google takes privacy seriously - because they scanned your email and found out you care about it...

By
Andrew
on April 7, 2008 8:56 PM | | Comments (4010) | TrackBacks (0)
In an ideal world, they could only hold your data for six months, according to recommendations of a European Commission advisory board, as noted by the BBC.


Search engines should delete personal data held about their users within six months, a European Commission advisory body on data protection has said.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months, while MSN does the same after 13 months.

The body said search companies were not clear enough on data protection.

...because they don't have to be. They also aren't clear on how data is aggregated, collected, and packaged for sale either.

Google said its privacy policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

Do they mean innovation in search, or innovation in selling ads? 


Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "Google takes privacy incredibly seriously; protecting our users' privacy is at the heart of all our products.

Is that why you index your users' email to provide them keyword-based ads, Mr. Fleischer? You mean security, not privacy. Privacy would mean that your systems don't scan every piece of mail to serve up contextual ads that have to do with the messages they're viewing. Privacy would mean that Google probably couldn't monetize nearly as much as it has. Privacy is the opposite of revenue for an operation like Google.


"It is the reason we were the first company to commit to anonymising our search logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our preference cookie lifetime."

Can we please stop using cookies as the be-all and end-all of privacy? Cookies are benign. You can set a short lifetime, but collect incredible loads of data with it. You can also collect cookies from other sites to see what your users are doing when they aren't on your pages. 

Red herrings all around. Six months should be good enough to satisfy privacy advocates and people who scream about terrorism and child pornography. Compromise works, eh?

The report also says that search engines should allow users to " access, inspect and correct all the personal data about themselves held by search engines, including their profiles and search history. "

I'm a bit confused as to what that means. Wouldn't law enforcement hate it if you could sanitize your search history? But, wouldn't there be a record of the correction? How would the company handle those records? The phrase "chasing ones' tail" comes to mind.

Now, will the U.S. consider a similar law? I wonder who will make the push for it, and how many dollars will be spent to lobby against it. 

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