Intellectual Property Law

The Article 29 Workers Party has stated recently that Google considers that the European law on data protection is not applicable to itself, even though Google has servers and establishments in . It also asserts that Google wishes to retain personal data of users beyond the 6 months period requested by the Article 29 Working Party, without any justification.

The dispute centres on records of user???s search queries. Google keeps these and uses them, it says, to improve the quality of search results, to fight fraud and to improve data security.

The Working Party has called for this information to be deleted after just 6 months, claiming keeping data for longer risked breaching data protection laws. The Working Party???s stance is that if personal data are stored, the retention period should be no longer than necessary for the specific purposes of the processing. The Party also recommended that Web users should be able to provide consent to the exploitation of their data- especially for profiling purposes. 

The Chairman of the Working Party has also criticised Google for failing to improve its anonymisation mechanisms, which he described as ???insufficient???. He said that Google considers that IP addresses are confidential data but not personal data which prevents granting certain rights to its users???He went on to accuse Google of failing to express a willingness to improve and clarify the methods that are used to gather the consent of its users. 

Google???s response to Working Party:

• On 8 September Google re-affirmed its wish to collaborate with European Data Protection authorities, stating that it would reduce its retention period from 18 to nine months.  However, the Workers Party responded by saying that in substance Google refuses for the moment to submit to the European Protection data law.

• Google has renounced one of its key arguments in favour of keeping the logs. Fleischer had previously claimed that the EU???s Data Retention Directive forced it to keep details for between 6 and 24 months. The Working Party said this was not the case because data retention laws only applied to telecom firms. Google agreed that search logs are outside the scope of the Data Retention Directive.

• In July Google made another concession to privacy activists when it agreed to publish a link to its privacy policy on its front page after calls for regulators to do so.

These concessions were welcomed by the Working party last week.

Working Party???s Conclusion:

???despite some progress, significant work must still be carried out to guarantee the rights of internet users and to ensure the respect of their privacy???In this perspective, the Article 29 Working Party will lead hearings with Google to discuss the points of dissension.