The Working Party is a collection of Europe's data
protection authorities, and it has been critical of Google's
privacy policies, particularly in relation to the storing of data
which links people to their search engine queries.
Google dominates internet search across Europe and the Working
Party launched an investigation into the company's privacy policies
and intends to publish an opinion on them. But an official told
Reuters news agency that it would not be published for some
months.
"We have written to Google to say that we are continuing our
work, that it is not limited to Google, and that we will adopt an
opinion at the beginning of 2008," an official told Reuters
following this week's meeting. "We want to adopt a comprehensive
opinion, saying how long they can keep data, and which ones."
Google provoked a storm of protest early this year when it said
that it would no longer keep search identifiers indefinitely, and
would delete them after between 18 and 24 months. That announcement
only highlighted the fact that the identifiers were kept at all,
and led to condemnation even of the reduced retention period.
Google compromised, saying it would delete the records after 18
months, but privacy officials still said that there was no need to
keep records for that long.
Google privacy chief Peter Fleischer said that it had to keep
the records because the EU's Data Retention Directive mandated it.
However, a data protection official has said that the Directive
does not apply to those records.
"The Data Retention Directive applies only to providers of
publicly available electronic communications services or of public
communication networks and not to search engine systems," senior EU
data protection official Philippos Mitletton told OUT-LAW.COM.
"Accordingly, Google is not subject to this Directive as far as it
concerns the search engine part of its applications and has no
obligations thereof."
