Search giant wants standard based on actual harm to consumer, but a privacy advocate says the proposed guidelines are weak…
San Francisco — Google Inc, the world’s largest Internet Company, will on Friday attempt to take the high ground in the debate over internet privacy, by calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to adopt international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline.
While Google is leading a charge to create a global privacy standard for how companies protect consumer data, the search giant is recommending that remedies focus on whether a person was actually harmed by having the information exposed.
The dotcom company’s privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, will address a conference Friday in Strasbourg, France, of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and ask for governments and businesses to agree on international privacy standards.
“An international body such as the ‘United Nations’ or the ‘OECD’ should draw up new guidelines as a global standard set of privacy principles agreed to by a variety of Asia-Pacific countries, Fleischer will tell Unesco members at the conference in Strasbourg on Friday.
Fleischer said the rise of the internet meant that vast amounts of information were being shipped around the globe, often to countries with no official data protection. Without a new set of rules to apply worldwide, surfers could lose confidence in the internet and hamper its development, he told reporters.
Speaking to reporters by phone on Thursday from France, Fleischer said the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework principles governing the use of personal data in commercial contexts represented the baseline privacy rules.
Google is proposing that the privacy framework adopted in Asia by ministers at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in 2004 could be used as a basis of a broader, international agreement, which has been endorsed by many of the APEC nations, including Australia and Hong Kong, but not all. China, for instance, does not endorse it, Fleischer said.
“If privacy principles can be agreed in such divergent countries, then we think that is a model for the rest of the world,” Fleischer told reporters. Generally, he added, “what we see is a lack of privacy standards” around the globe.
“Three quarters of the countries in the world have no privacy regimes at all and among those that do have laws, many of them were largely adopted before the rise of the internet,” he said.
“Google believes we need to work together to create minimum global standards partly by law and partly by self-regulation,” Fleischer said in a telephone conference call. “We need collaboration between government and the private sector.”
“It is said that every time you use a credit card, your details are passed through six different countries. We are talking about this to help set the framework for the internet of the future.”
He described a typical online shopping scenario involving a French consumer using a U.S. company’s online service. The U.S. firm might have data centers in multiple countries, perhaps Belgium and Ireland in the case of a French consumer. Customer service for the transaction might be handled out of India.
“So every time a person uses a credit card their information may cross six or seven national boundaries,” Fleischer said.
The APEC framework “promotes a flexible approach to information privacy protection” and is a “practical policy approach to enable accountability in the flow of data while preventing impediments to trade,” according to the group’s fact sheet.
The nine principles of the framework are: preventing harm; integrity of personal information; notice; security safeguards; collection limitations; access and correction; uses of personal information; accountability; and choice.
Google has become a focal point for a debate on internet privacy since European Union data protection bodies earlier this year questioned the length of time the company kept data on individuals using its search engine. Google was also criticized by Privacy International, the human rights group, as being potentially “hostile” to privacy.
Since then, Google has taken steps to improve its image. It agreed to limit the time it keeps search data to just 18 months, and has started working with Privacy International in order to be removed from the organization’s blacklist.
Europe operates under a harmonized set of strict privacy regulations, but these rules were set forth in 1995, largely before the rise of the commercial Internet, Fleischer said.
By contrast, the United States has no all-encompassing federal privacy law but rather a scattershot approach to privacy, state by state and industry by industry. Meanwhile, Canada offers a hybrid approach between the two camps.
The company said it had already held discussions with some European privacy regulators, including those in Spain and France, and is encouraging either the United Nations or the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to take an active role in promoting global privacy standards.
But despite such moves, the Silicon Valley Company, which was started in a garage only nine years ago, has not managed to escape criticism of its own practices.
Google Street View, which is currently only available for some American cities, is created by taking a sequence of urban photographs and then creating a virtual street-level image. Some of the pictures have included identifiable individuals, and the service has been attacked over its potential to invade personal privacy.
Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, said this week that she had written to Google over concerns that the system may be illegal in Canada. “I am concerned that, if the Street View application were deployed in Canada, it might not comply with our federal privacy legislation,” she said in the letter.
Fleischer said setting a standard global privacy rules is not only vital for the health of the Internet, but for the booming global economy and expanding Google’s own business agenda to move beyond the current patchwork of conflicting privacy rules.
Analysts say it is crucial for Google to maintain an impeccable reputation on privacy, or it may begin losing users.
A number of smaller search engine companies are already using the recent concerns over Google’s data policies as an opportunity to poach users.