p2pnet news | Freedom:- Google and Microsoft privacy policies "could very well be considered virtual or fictional … because search engines do not sufficiently emphasize their own privacy policies on their home pages, nor are they accessible to users," says Spain’s data protection regulator, Artemi Rallo Lombarte (right).

The policies are "complex and unintelligible to users," he’s quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

Google and the European data privacy regulators are locked in a major disagreement over whether or not IP addresses comprise personal information.

"Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law," says AP, going on:

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address "then it has to be regarded as personal data."

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of "whois" Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Last year Google, dead last in Privacy International’s privacy rankings and which, said PI, has an, "institutional hostility to privacy," promised to dramatically reduce the length of time it keeps your cookies from 30 to two years.

"Looks good, at first blush, but it’s little more than an empty gesture," said p2pnet.

Now, AP has EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) executive director Marc Rotenberg saying it was "absurd" for Google to claim stripping out the last two figures from a stored IP address, "made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations"

"It’s one of the things that make computer people giggle," EPIC says, according to this story. "The more the companies know about you, the more commercial value is obtained."

Google privacy lawyer Peter Fleischer said the company collects IP addresses, "to give customers [read advertisers] a more accurate service because it knows what part of the world a search result comes from and what language they use – and that was not enough to identify an individual user," states AP:

Microsoft doesn’t record IP address which identify individual computers when it logs search terms, it says. "Its Internet strategy relies on users logging into the Passport network that is linked to its popular Hotmail and Messenger services."

But, "neither of the search engines received a pat on the back from Spain’s data protection regulator, Artemi Rallo Lombarte, who criticized them for not trying to make their privacy policies accessible to normal people," adds the story.

Slashdot it!

Also See:-

Associated Press – EU Official: IP Is Personal, January 21, 2008
dead last – Google flunks major privacy study, June 11, 2007

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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