Stanford Center for Internet and Society

The European Commission’s Article 29 Working Party has released its “Opinion on data protection issues related to search engines,” recommending a shorter retention period for search logs. Today, industry standards run between 13 (Yahoo!, AOL) and 18 months (Google, Microsoft), following which the log is partially (Google) or completely (Microsoft) anonymized.

Nestled in among the latest round of public comments solicited by the Federal Trade Commission on “behavioral advertising” was a little gem: a filing by the Newspaper Association of America arguing that online news outlets have a First Amendment right to track the activities of website visitors in order to target advertisements to them.