Google Inc on Monday defended a policy of retaining data on Web users for up to 18 months as necessary to improve search results, responding to an EU report that saw no need for search services to keep personal data beyond six months.
A group of data protection commissioners from across the European Union found that computer Web addresses and cookie monitoring are personal information that search services should do more to protect.
The long-anticipated set of recommendations for how European data protection laws should be applied to Web search services was published on Friday and can be found at tinyurl.com/5yukzm.
