Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The coming fight over privacy

EU Group Head Says IP is Personal
In a ruling that could have long term repercussions -- especially on the way in which search engines record and store data -- the Head of the European Union's Group of Data Privacy Regulators said IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that identify computers on the Internet should generally be regarded as personal information.

Peter Scharr, who is also the Data Protection Commissioner for Germany, was speaking at a hearing of the European Parliament on the subject of 'online data protection'. He expressly said that when someone is identified by an IP or Internet Protocol address, "then it has to be regarded as personal data".

Privacy is the next killer ap. The market isn't ready yet, but it will be.

Privacy/data protection regulators around the world

1 comment:

Benjamin Wright said...

Even if it is normally illegal for a citizen to record or process data such as an IP address, there might be rare situations where the citizen is legally justified.