Google Yet To Make Headway On Cookies Pledge In Privacy Debate

Google and the other major search engines have all been criticized in both the US and Europe over privacy issues and consumer data retention. More generally, there’s an intensifying debate about behavioral ad targeting and privacy occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. The European authorities have been considerably more aggressive, however, in demanding action from search engines. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that despite a pledge from Google to change policies associated with cookies, during the privacy controversy surrounding the DoubleClick acquisition, the company has yet to take any action.

According to the Financial Times:

Google fended off the outcry partly with a promise to use technology to minimise cookies’ invasiveness. It later announced technology trials to try to come up with new versions of cookies that would pose less of a problem, for instance by breaking down the data it collected about each consumer into smaller pieces through what are known as “crumbled cookies”.

But speaking last week, Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer, said Google had yet to start substantial internal deliberations about how to deal with the issue. He blamed this on regulatory restrictions that prevented the company from broaching the issue with DoubleClick executives before the deal was finally approved last month. “It turns out that by the nature of the rules we could not talk to DoubleClick until now,” he said.

He said Google still planned to look into the cookie issue but it had proved more complex than Google had realised. “What we’ve discovered about cookies is that every question leads to a one-hour conversation.”

Google previously said it would “anonymize” search records to protect consumer privacy. Google also said it would set cookies to expire after two years, as opposed to many years in the future under the old policy. It’s not clear to me whether this is the pledge that the Financial Times is referring to (I suspect not).

Regardless, with increasing use of behavioral targeting, including in search, on the one side and regulatory authorities (especially in Europe) pushing for greater privacy controls and shorter data retention time frames, it’s unlikely that the privacy debate will end soon.