How much information Google collects on its users and what it does with that information has once again become a burning topic for internet users.
Last weekend, Privacy International (PI), a London-based human rights watchdog, published a report which ranked leading internet companies according to their approach to privacy.
The draft report (PI will spend the next two months in an "outreach" mode before finalising it) identified a number of companies including AOL, Apple, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo! as posing substantial threats to privacy. Google ranked lowest of all 23 services and was classed as "hostile to privacy".
The highest-ranking achieved by any firm was "generally privacy-aware but in need of improvement" which PI awarded to the BBC, eBay, Last.fm, Live-Journal and Wikipedia.
Following publication of the report, PI suggested that Google's representatives were engaging in a smear campaign against it and demanded a public apology.
"I was very disappointed with the PI report because it was based on inaccuracies and misunderstanding," says Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel with Google. "I can't accept the conclusions it drew."
Mr Fleischer counters that Google has not complied with sweeping requests from the US Department of Justice, has never had a data breach unlike some competitors and has a clear data retention policy while other internet companies have none.
As if that wasn't a big enough headache for the company that famously included the corporate ethic "Don't be evil" in its stock market prospectus, this week it also responded to a letter from an EU advisory panel asking why it holds user data for so long.
Mr Fleischer posted to the official Google blog about the response and linked to the full text of the letter. Last March, Google announced that it would keep data on users for 18-24 months after which it would be "anonymised" and could not be traced back to an individual user.
He maintains it needs the data to improve its services.
The information that Google says it collects in its server logs includes the IP address of the computer used to visit Google, the date and time of the search, the search query, the browser and operating system being used and the unique "cookie" ID of the user.
A cookie is a text file created the first time a user visits a site which stores information about their preferences. In its response to the EU, Google said it would only hold data for 18 months but called for a global debate on data retention policy. EU justice and security commissioner Franco Frattini welcomed that announcement, but others are not so easily convinced.
"We are losing our privacy by stealth," says Dr Eoin O'Dell, a senior lecturer in law at Trinity College Dublin and publisher of the Cearta.ie blog.
"People just see the convenience of search but not the amount of personal information they are leaving behind."
He suggests that Google only retaining data for 18 months "doesn't seem anything other than evil" and is only being done to support its targeted advertising model.
