IP addresses should be classified as personally identifiable info, the head of the European Union’s data-privacy regulators said on Monday. Google begs to differ.

EU regulators are preparing a report on the privacy policies of World Wide Web search engines, including those operated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, and how well they comply with EU privacy laws. Peter Scharr, Germany’s data-protection commissioner, heads the group and has said that an IP address must be regarded as personal notes when it can be used to identify someone. Google disagreed in a hearing Monday before the European Parliament.

“If a law-enforcement authority makes a concrete demand to, let’s say, investigate child pornography, and whether it is made through valid legal process, we reply to it,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, told the hearing on online documents protection.

“The rules vary in each specific country,” Fleischer said, “so that is why we have to face it with a good team

of lawyers. We additionally challenged a disproportionate inquiry for millions of pieces of info in a U.S. court, and we won.”

Political Privacy Wrangling

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has not come to a consensus on whether IP addresses should be defined as “personal data” subject to privacy rules. Fleischer maintains there is no black-and-white reply. Sometimes an IP address can be considered personal details and sometimes not, he said, depending on the context and what personal info it reveals.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy knowledge Center, disagreed. “I wish that was the case, but we are moving toward the IPv6 model, for which it will be even more the case that IP addresses will be personably identifiable,” he told the European Parliament.

Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick underscores the need to take documents protection into history, he continued. The Google-DoubleClick deal is currently being examined by…

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