IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Web, should generally be regarded as personal knowledge, the head of the European Union’s group of goods privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s info protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of World Wide Web search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online details protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Net protocol, address “then it has to be regarded as personal info.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many society regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be

personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Web cafes or offices are used by several society.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of “whois” World Wide Web sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal data would have implications for how search engines record info.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the moment it stored search data to 18 months. It plus reduced the duration limit on the cookies that gather data on how humans use the Net from a default of 30 years to an self-moving expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy data Center, or EPIC, said it was “absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News

IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Net, should generally be regarded as personal data, the head of the European Union’s group of details privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s goods protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Net search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online info protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Web protocol, address “then it has to be regarded as personal documents.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many folks regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal

or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in World Wide Web cafes or offices are used by several citizens.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of “whois” Net sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal info would have implications for how search engines record documents.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the duration it stored search data to 18 months. It additionally reduced the date limit on the cookies that gather data on how citizens use the Web from a default of 30 years to an self-moving expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy data Center, or EPIC, said it was “absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News