Google needs to keep hold of information about people’s search history if it is to combat the sort of hacking it experienced in China last month, the company’s top privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, said Tuesday.
“The unprecedented hacking [of Google's networks] and the threat of similar such attacks in the future emphasized the importance of internal analysis of logs,” Fleischer said in a telephone interview.
He added that it is essential to find an appropriate balance between respecting users’s; privacy and maintaining network security. “To do that we need to open a dialog with the cybersecurity community. You can’t discuss privacy in a vacuum,” he said.
At the end of this week Google will submit a proposal to the Article 29 committee, a body comprising data protection officials from all 27 countries in the European Union, suggesting the creation of a panel of cybersecurity experts as well as privacy officials, Fleischer said.
The committee has asked all leading search engine makers to respond to its concerns about privacy by the end of January.
Microsoft said earlier Tuesday that in response to the data protection officials’ concerns, it is reducing the length of time it holds the IP addresses of users searching the Net through Bing, its recently launched search engine, to six months from 18 months at present.
via Google to Call for Creation of EU Privacy, Security Panel – PC World Business Center.
