EU reverses itself on data retention.

• Position: WEB

The European Parliament is calling for legislation that would require search engines to record and store all Internet search queries for up to two years.

The directive, "Written Declaration 29," adopted by Parliament in June 2010, is meant to crack down on child pornography by requiring European Union (EU) members to order search engines to store all search traffic for possible analysis by law enforcement.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing already store their users' search data; the proposal may be aimed at search engines, such as Ixquick and Startpage, which currently do not retain such data, according to media reports.

The proposal seems to contradict the efforts of the Article 29 Working Party of the European Parliament. It has worked to get search engines to reduce their search data retention to only six months. As a result of its efforts, Microsoft has pledged to anonymize IP and cookie data and delete them completely after six months; Google anonymizes IP addresses on its server logs after nine months.

Most EU experts believe the proposal is a long shot...