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Google Data Practices Said To Violate EU Law
- Bloomberg News, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11 AM
Google may be in legal trouble again. The search giant may be violating European Union law by storing information on its customers' queries for as long as two years. After a stretch of
high-profile acquisitions, all the big Web firms, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, have come under scrutiny for the way they capture user-surfing information. EU regulators last week
suggested such practices might violate civil liberties.
"Google may have initiated personalization efforts which are more advanced in some ways, but it's an industrywide issue," said
Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, California.
The next meeting in June of the EU group, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, could prove to be decisive. The party is now giving Google time to respond. The party admitted the company's recent decision to keep users' search data for under two years is "very much a step in the right direction, but that still goes against EU Internet law. The report said privacy-law advisers are also reviewing the policies of Microsoft and Yahoo.
