The EU's and Google's official positions (was: EU Official: IP Is Personal)

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> In the case the german regulator is dealing with the ip 
> address is not be considered exclusive of the rest of a data 
> set. The question is given  a commercially valuable dataset 
> which contains ip addresses what is sufficient to anonymize 
> the users while maintaining the value of the data. The 
> regulator has one view, which is probably wrong and search 
> engine company (google is the one that is quoted) has another 
> which is also probably wrong.

First of all, this is not about the German data protection agency
but about the EU Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

Secondly, there is no need to flail around wondering what is the
meaning of this one choice quote that an Associated Press reporter
built their story around. The EU publishes its position on its
website:
<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/dv/opinion_0
4-2007_personal_data_/Opinion_04-2007_personal_data_en.pdf> 
Peter Schaar is the Chairman of the group which produced this document.
Note that this came out in April of last year. The meeting that the
reporter attended was a public seminar discussing various case studies.

There is no transcript of the meeting and no formal submission from 
Peter Schaar or the German data protection agency so I assume that
the reported comments came during some discussion of Google's 
submission which is here:
<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/dv/google_pr
ivacy_booklet_pfleischer_/Google_Privacy_booklet_PFleischer_en.pdf>

If you want to see the program for the meeting, it is here:
<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/dv/programme
_rev2_0/programme_rev2_0EN.pdf>

It would be interesting to see some INFORMED discussion on the
EU's position or Google's position, because the EU and Google
are powerful organizations which matter. But there is really
no point in prolonged discussion of some reporter's choice
quote which may or may not have been taken out of context.

--Michael Dillon