At least the EC has the balls - and ability - to take Google et al on....

Monday, April 7. 2008

At least the EC has the balls - and ability - to take Google et al on....

The BBC reports that the EC is likely to take on board the findings of a report on Search Engine data protection.

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.

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

Sorry guys, we've been working on and off with datamining and data analysis systems over at least 10 years, and it is very hard to think of any search scenario where the customer benefits from more than 6 months data storage. Ad scenarios, sure - but not user search.

The EC have fortunately seen through the fluumery on this one, and they have also struck a blow for appropriate, rather than all, data.

The report also said search engines did not need to gather additional personal data, beyond the IP address of a machine being used, in order to deliver basic search results and advertisements.

The report issued a set of obligations to search engines firms, including:

- Search engines should get informed consent from users if they correlate personal data across different services, such as desktop search

- Search engine providers must delete or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal data once they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected

- Personal data should not be held by search engines for longer than six months

- In case search engine providers retain personal data longer than six months, they must demonstrate comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service

- It is not necessary to collect additional personal data from individual users in order to be able to perform the service of delivering search results and advertisements

- If search engine providers use cookies, their lifetime should be no longer than demonstrably necessary

- Search engine providers must give users clear and intelligible information about their identity and location and about the data they intend to collect store or transmit, as well as the purpose for which they are collected

The report also warned that if search engines enriched personal data about users from third parties they could be breaking the law unless customers had given explicit consent.

The guidelines are, in my view, sensible - in fact I suggest the Search Engines go with it or else they will risk being nailed by user backlash when people eventually do work out what is going on.

Posted by Alan Patrick in New Search at 21:04 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I'd much rather instead of regulation of this sort, that the public be better informed about privacy issues and the specific privacy policy of the site and its rivals (so that the free market can chose) in simple, clear symbols or language. I think I've argued in a previous thread that just as blogs now explain their copyright policy with standard creative commons licenses, we need a unified system of privacy 'categories', or scores (anything that my Mum can understand and decide whether to use Google or Yahoo), incorporating data retention, sharing, and portability policies.

the Internet has such low barriers to substitution, especially with something like a search engine, and relatively low barriers to entry for rivals that want to make a name for themselves on the back of a top notch privacy attitude, that regulation like this really oughtn't be necessary. The Internet ecosystem is failing at autoregulation with its careless approach to privacy.

#1 phil bradley (Homepage) on 2008-04-07 22:28 (Reply)

Phil, I originally thought the same, but the sad truth is 80%+ of the public don't care / don't understand all this stuff.

The search engines are not the only ones up to this stuff - they're latecomers, which is why the whole data protection act legislation was brought in awhile ago.

But I don't know how to structure the game theory in this one so that there is a trend towards your top notch plays, so in the absence of that regulation will have to do for now imho

#2 alan p on 2008-04-07 22:41 (Reply)

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