Google and Privacy

While Google’s legal counsel has expressed a willingness to co-operate it will still be concerned with The EC Article 29 Data Protection Working Party’s letter to it concerning its privacy practices.

Article 29 is an independent EC advisory body on data protection and privacy. The body has written to Google in particular about Google’s new privacy practices relating to the anonymisation of server logs that are more than 18 to 24 months old.

In March, Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, launced a new policy . He said that the company will keep its server log data but will make that data “much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18–24 months.”

Among other issues addressed in the letter, the Working Party’s concerns include that Google has not sufficiently specified the purposes for which server logs need to be kept and why such a long period has been chosen.