The European Union will take a look at the privacy policies of many big Internet search engines, not just Google.
A working group of privacy officers will contact Google competitors to ask about their policies for capturing and retaining data from searches conducted on their engines. Newswire reports list Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN and Lycos as among the likely candidates for scrutiny.
“The Working Party will deal with search engines in general and scrutinize their activities from a data-protection point of view, because this issue affects an ever-growing number of users,” the group said in a release.
European Data Protection supervisor Peter Hustinx said his group will compile a general report by the end of the year “from which national data protection authorities can address players in their jurisdictions.”
Earlier this month, after being singled out for the worst privacy practices in the business by a U.K. watchdog agency, Google agreed to make its search files anonymous after 18 months, rather than in the broader 18-to-24-month time frame it uses currently. But the company also warned that data retention laws in the U.S. might require going back to the 24-month holding period.
Network
