EU want search engines to remove user data within 6 months

A European Commission advisory body has said in a report that the online search engine companies should remove user data collected from their searching habits within a period of six months.

This could cause problems for the giants in the internet search market Google, Yahoo and MSN as all of these companies hold the data for a longer period.

The body added in its report that the search engine companies are not very transparent on how they collect information and what they do with it.

Google has said in the past that their privacy policies are designed to strike the right balance between user privacy and security. It also gives them enough scope to innovate and improve their services.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel had this to say on this new development: “Google takes privacy incredibly seriously; protecting our users’ privacy is at the heart of all our products. It is the reason we were the first company to commit to anonymising our search logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our preference cookie lifetime.”

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