EU Wants Search Engines To Delete User Data After Six Months
The Article 29 Data Protection Party, comprised of 27 countries in the European Union, decided today that the maximum time search engine should be allowed to keep user data is six months unless there is a “valid justification” for holding it any longer.
Recently, Google had kept user info for as long as two years. Under fire, they reduced it to 18 months with Yahoo and Microsoft following suit. Yahoo only keeps data for 13 months.
As Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco said, this threatens the “golden goose” that is targeted Internet advertising. With less user data available to analyze and target ads for, the ability to of ad servers to gather accurate user data will decrease and it will become increasingly difficult to serve more specialized ads.
This is yet another example of the EU getting far tougher on privacy than the United States government. In influence of the European Union on technological matters is kind of remarkable. American and Asian officials, perhaps more business minded than the Europeans, tend to lag behind in these situations and the Europeans end up setting the regulatory tone. Other nations don’t necessarily heed their recommendations, but it does get the discussion going.
Thanks to Search Engine Land and Bloomberg for the info.
Technorati Tags: internet advertising, search engine marketing, european union
