For more than a year, European data privacy officials have been battling with U.S.-based Internet search engines, trying to get them to conform to European restrictions on the storage of personal information gleaned from the Web.
Now, as the U.S. titans Google, Microsoft and Yahoo continue to retain personal data beyond the six-month time limit established this year by the European Commission, regulators say their patience is running thin.
“For the moment, Google refuses to submit to European data protection law,” said Alex Turk, the French data protection chief, who is also the chairman of a European Commission working group on the issue. “Despite some progress, significant work must still be carried out to guarantee the rights of Internet users and to ensure the respect of their privacy.”
The dispute centers on the search engines’ practice of collecting demographic details from users, which the Internet companies argue is needed to fine-tune searches, guard against fraud and aim relevant advertising at Web surfers.
That practice has raised concerns on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, four members of Congress began a review of industry practices in August, while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is developing voluntary guidelines. For now there are no time limits on data retention in the United States.
In Europe, where 221 million people made 24.6 billion searches in the month of March alone, according to the research firm comScore, regulators want Internet companies to discard these data after six months. Google recently agreed to cut in half its retention time, to nine months. Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN Live Search hold such data for 13 months and 18 months, respectively.
Turk, whose panel met with other data privacy officials last week, said he planned to hold a hearing in December with representatives of Google and other Internet companies to try…