Google bows before EU data privacy requests

How these mighty corporations tumble before government pressures. Google has done that in the past, with creating a censored version of search for China (http://www.google.cn/), bowing down to pressures from governments about the level of details displayed for Government and military structures in Google Earth, and so on. Well, here is one more.
Google saves search data (that could be used to identify actual people after some research) and uses that for commercial purposes, to better target advertising. Earlier, it used to save this data indefinitely, then changed that to 24 months after some pressure from privacy advocates.
Then in May, Google got another blast on this topic. It got told by the European Union data watchdog (representing 27 EU countries) that the 24 month period was unacceptable under privacy concerns, and asked Google to reply by mid-June about how these concerns could be addressed. Well, now Google seems to have buckled under pressure and is now reducing the time that this data will be stored to 18 months (from the earlier 24 months). Refer this article:

The European Union's top security official lauded Google Inc's. decision to scale back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users as a step towards addressing privacy concerns.
The world's top provider of Web search services said this week it was ready to curtail the time it stored user data to a year and a half, seeking to mollify an EU watchdog that has questioned its privacy policies.
Each time a Google user searches the Web, the company gathers information about that customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers. Google shares general user statistics but is adamant it never shares personal data outside the company.

However, this is still right now only Google that has made the concession. To some extent this is justified since Google controls 60% of the search market, but a lot of other searches such as MSN, Yahoo, etc and other companies such as Microsoft, Apple, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon, also have not disclosed as to how long they retain customer data. It would be their turn eventually; it just requires an accidental release of data from any of these places, and they will face the same amount of pressure as Google.

Google in trouble with EU over privacy

Privacy experts have always been somewhat hesitant about the level of information gathered by Google about the people using the services provided by Google. People reveal a lot about themselves through the items they search for, and along with their IP addresses, a lot can be gleaned just from these records. And Google will maintain all such records for a period of 2 years. This data helps Google fine-tune its advertising, using these records to direct ads more efficiently at users.
However, the European Union is pretty gung-ho about maintaining adequate security and the time period that Google maintains does not seem to be acceptable to it. And this issue is getting heated up. In addition, the EU packs a hefty punch. It has 400 million consumers for Google, a very large number.
In a escalation, data protection chiefs from the 27 EU countries wrote to Google asking for a justification of its policies on data retention and storage. Refer this article:

In the latest example of a U.S. technology giant potentially being called on the carpet in Europe, Google has been warned that it may be violating European Union privacy laws by storing data on its users for up to two years.
Privacy experts said the letter was the first salvo in what could become a determined effort by the European Commission to force Google to change how it does business in the EU, whose 400 million consumers outnumber the United States.
Any EU effort to impose limits on Google, which as a U.S.-based firm operates under U.S. law, would be the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive actions taken by European policymakers to reign in global technology companies.
According to one member, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the group, the panel is concerned that Google's retention period is too long and is designed to serve commercial interests.

Google in the past has shown that it is responding to privacy concerns by setting an absolute time limit of 2 years for how long the data will be stored (from the earlier infinite time interval). However, if this time period is not good for EU officials, then Google can be in for a fair amount of trouble. The EU have showed that they can take on large corporations, having taken on Microsoft earlier.
More interesting is whether Google will comply, and what that will mean for other search providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo that are not yet disclosing the interval to which they store their records. My feeling is that if pushed hard enough, Google will accept to reduce the time interval by a few more months to get a compromise.

Familiar news: EU tightens screws on Microsoft

In an anti-trust ruling from 3 years back, the European Commission had ordered that Microsoft had to license technical information to competing companies (IBM, Sun, and Oracle) so that they make their softwares work better with the Windows platform.
For Microsoft, complying with the order would have been hard to do, since it never believed that it was doing anything wrong; more so, because the European Commission was far stricter than US regulatory authorities on finding Microsoft guilty of anti-trust.
As a result, Microsoft demanded around 5.95% of these competing companies server revenues for royalty purposes. This is a pretty high amount, given that margins are not very high, and companies would be very unwilling to pay such revenues.
Now it seems that the European Commission is proposing that this demand from Microsoft be rejected, with objections from the commission stating that this demand was very high. A response from Microsoft is awaited.
Read this story here.