EU Broadens Probe of Search Engines and Privacy

Raver32 sends in word of a PC World article reporting that EU officials are looking beyond Google in their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy. Quoting: "A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google's rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long, Hustinx said. Hustinx... declined to name the companies. However, they are believed to include Yahoo Inc., Lycos Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live.com."

Comments

Re:Pot / Kettle

[Jaidan]

I believe it should be up to the citizens themselves to protect their information. A few simple changes are all that are needed in any country imo, though I am most familiar with the US policies.

I believe companys have every right to sell the information that you provide them. Being able to will drive up company revenue, which in many circumstances will lead to improved product, or reduced prices. However they should not be able to do this haphazardly. Privacy policies should be required to be clear, easy to find, and explicit. The default should be no sharing unless stated otherwise (meaning if a company provides no policy, then the policy is no information may be shared). Lastly, privacy policies should not be able to be retroactively changed. The statement "may be changed at anytime" should be forbidden, or more exactly any information collected pre change should stay under the previous rules until the customer allows the update.

Basically I don't feel that the government of any country should be looking out for my privacy. My privacy is my problem not theirs. However, there needs to be enough oversight to provide the tools I need to be able to protect my privacy. Stopping retroactive changes, ambiguous privacy policies, and hard to locate and nonexistant policies should provide adequate tools for any consumer to guard themselves. The government getting in the way will just cause problems if they try to be my nanny or mother.

Unfortunately right now...nobody is really doing it right as far as I'm concerned. The US is too lax on it's rules, and Europe has too much government regulation for my taste.