14 DAY TRIAL // After the recent complaints concerning the privacy of the best search engine on the Internet, Google kept the first page of the newspapers, and the European Union decided that it's the time to get involved into the business and stay in touch with all the search engines. According to iTWire, the European Union's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party contains valuable information about the officials' plans to interact with the search engines and improve their guidelines.
"The Working Party will deal with search engines in general and scrutinise their activities from a data protection point of view, because this issue affects an ever growing number of users," officials announced according to the same source.
A few weeks ago, Google was criticized for its guidelines, the EU describing the Mountain View company as a firm that doesn't seem to be interested in the users' privacy. Moreover, the EU officials praised Yahoo's and Microsoft's efforts of protecting the users, a move that made Google work on its privacy issues.
After a few days from the report, Google announced that it has reduced the period of 18-24 months for anonymizing the users' logs to 18 months but, in certain countries with specific laws, it is forced to keep the 24-months period. Besides this, the search giant rolled out a special blog to keep the consumers and the authorities up-to-date with the latest Google efforts concerning the privacy.
Recently, the European Commission praised Google's efforts, but sustained that there is even more work to be done for Google to become a perfect company. According to iTWire, the use of the information included in the consumers' logs can be very important for the companies because they offer relevant details and are able to help them design more powerful products. "The downside is the potential for misuse, for example by allowing access to this information by other companies or government agencies," iTWire added.