From The Register - “EU privacy watchdogs extend search engine probe”:

According to IDG, European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said on Wednesday that his Article 29 working group had decided to write to Google’s competitors to ask about the information they keep. The newswire reports the targets include Yahoo!, Lycos and Microsoft.

The plan is to make a general assessment of the effect search engines are having on EU citizens’ privacy at either the working group’s October or December meeting. Hustinx said: “We will issue a generic paper from which national data protection authorities can address players in their jurisdictions.”

I can’t say I’m surprised by this move. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that Google’s response to the original inquiry had something to do with the expansion of this probe.

Why?

Because Google makes no secret about the fact that it’s the only search engine that has publicly vowed to make server data anonymous after a specified period of time. It makes no secret of the fact that other search engines have and continue to hand over data to government agencies while Google still refuses to do so (and goes to court over it).

I’m sure the EU privacy group is thinking something along the lines of:

Well… if Google is making this stuff anonymous after 2 years - and no one else has talked about their policies - how long is everyone keeping this data? Maybe Google isn’t the search engine we should be focusing on here.

And I would agree with that statement. While I would never suggest that Google should be excluded from privacy probes - nor would I suggest that any other search engine has more information collected that Google - I do think Google is among the better of the information gatherers out there.

So I think the EU is making a wise move. If they want to scrutinize Google, they’d be wise to look at some of the search company’s less-than-up-front competitors just as closely.

Via ArsTechnica