The European Union Does Things a Little Differently than the United States

While the U.S. government salivates over the the data that major tech companies store on Web users -- issuing subpoenas on a frequent basis to get a hold of whatever it can -- the European Union advocates on behalf of its users by warning companies not to store search data for too long.

An excerpt from a New York Times article:

Google has been warned that it may be violating European Union privacy laws by storing search data from its users for up to two years, the latest example of a United States technology giant whose practices face a collision with European standards.

An advisory panel of data-protection chiefs from the 27 countries in the European Union sent a letter last week to Google asking it to justify its policy of retaining data on Internet addresses and individual search habits, Friso Roscam Abbing, a spokesman for the European Union’s justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Friday.

Privacy experts said the letter was the first salvo in what could become a determined effort by the European Commission to force Google to change how it does business in Europe, where the 400 million consumers outnumber those in the United States.

Any effort to impose limits on Google, which operates under United States law, would be the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive actions taken by European policy makers to rein in global technology companies.

Read more:

• The New York Times: E.U. Probes Google Over Data Retention Policy