In response to a European Union report that suggests search engines should limit data retention to six months, Google on Monday defended its policy of storing data on search-engine usage for up to 18 months.
European Commission’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party called for increased protections for users, including user notification, and issued a warning to Internet search engines: Failing to protect consumer’s personal information could be unlawful.
“It is the opinion of the Working Party that search engines in their role as collectors of user data have so far insufficiently explained the nature and purpose of their operations to the users of their services,” the report says. “The Working Party does not see a basis for a retention period beyond six months.”
Google Sees Benefits
Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, was quick to respond on the corporate blog. A Google search, he wrote, is far more likely to provide consumers with the information they are looking for than it did a few years ago — and that has not happened by accident.
It is the result, he said, of Google engineers painstakingly analyzing the patterns in server logs to improve the relevance of searches. At the same time, he continued, Google has developed privacy policies to give users choices over the information they share with the company.
“We believe that data-retention requirements have to take into account the need to provide quality products and services for users, like accurate search results, as well as system security and integrity concerns. We have recently discussed some of the many ways that using this data helps improve users’ experience, from making our products safe, to preventing fraud, to building language models to improve search results,” Fleischer said, noting that how data is used to improve the consumer experience is sometimes missed in discussions about online…