EC Article 29 Working Party Releases Search Engine Report

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. The Article 29 Working Party report can be found here. A recent comparison of the retention practices of leading search engines by the Center for Democracy and Technology can be found here. For more about search logs, see Google’s privacy tutorial.