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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."
Will they be checking that European search engine the French were pushing? The Google killer?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Considering the data retention being required of ISPs by countries like the UK how can they complain about Google etc. ?
Round up the usual suspects, drag them down the station, knock a few heads together and see what falls out.
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Hardly surprising - see here
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,
"But arguing over whether discussion should focus on the worst offender, versus a general industry indictment, can be a distraction from the need to implement privacy protections which cannot be easily ignored."
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001218
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/mt-comments.cgi
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This is just another example of the EU trying to limit American companies so that they can force their own homegrown (and invariably inferior) products on their member states.
It's a real shame the EU doesn't fund innovation instead of lame copies, then it wouldn't have to spend so much money trying to keep outside products down.
Another example of EU idiocy is the co-production system in TV and film - the EU will help fund projects that are produced in more than one EU country. This is great, except the associated costs of forcing a production to be split can raise the budget by 25% or even more. Quite often this is more than the EU will put in to the project. This is why there are so many crappy films with half the crew being French, a quarter German and a quarter from Luxembourg.
The EU started out as a common market, to make trade easier between European countries. Now it's turned into an anti-America machine. Now everybody loses.
The following research paper (PDF) from September of last
year might be useful:
Googling Considered Harmful
Abstract:
"Virtually every Internet user on the planet uses the powerful free
tools offered by a handful of information service providers in
many aspects of their personal and professional lives. As a result,
users and organizations are freely providing unprecedented
amounts of sensitive information in return for such services as
Internet search, email, mapping, blog hosting, instant messaging
and language translation. Traditional security measures, such as
cryptography and network firewalls, are largely ineffective
because of the implicit trust paradigm with the service provider.
In this paper, we directly address this problem by providing a
threat analysis framework of information disclosure vectors,
including fingerprinting of individuals and groups based on their
online activities, examine the effectiveness of existing privacy
countermeasures and clearly outline the critical future work
required to protect our corporate, organizational and individual
privacy when using these services."
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