(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)
Even though Google recently announced the reduction to 18 - 24 months of the retention time for data related to users and their searches, its privacy practices are discussed by the Article 29 Working Group and could be investigated by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The Norwegian Data Protection Group has already sent a letter to the major search engine with concerns over several data protection issues, especially on data retention. A second letter is expected to come from the European Commission on behalf of the Article 29 Working Party regarding Google's compliance with the European data protection legislation. Following this process, if Google privacy practices are considered in breach of the European legislation, the company could be fined by the national data protection authorities.
Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong explained to MarketWatch that the company "recently announced changes to our logs retention policies which we believe address these concerns" raised by the Norwegian group's letter. "We speak regularly with European regulators, privacy advocates and users for their feedback as part of a continuous and rigorous review of our privacy practices."
Privacy concerns are raised also by the US privacy NGO Electronic Privacy Information Center along with the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups that have filed a joint complaint with FTC asking for an investigation into the potential threat to consumer privacy posed by Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick.
Google announced last week its intention to buy DoubleClick for 3.1 billion USD, but the privacy experts fear that this "will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world"
The complaint also says that Google, that reaches 75 percent of the European search market, needs to meet the privacy standards as established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Marc Rotenberg, EPIC executive director, explained: "We believe that this complaint provides an opportunity for (the) FTC to look closely at whether the online-advertising industry provides adequate privacy protection for Internet users and (to) consider the privacy impact of non-personally identifiable information collected through search histories."
EU privacy body criticizes Google practices (19.04.2007)
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/eu-privacy-body-criticizes-googl...
Google draws privacy complaint to FTC (20.04.2007)
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-6177819.html
EPIC Files Complaint With FTC Regarding Google/DoubleClick Merger
(20.04.2007)
http://www.epic.org/privacy/ftc/google/epic_complaint.pdf
EDRI-gram: Google limits the search data retention period (28.03.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.6/google-data-retention