What Google Wants, Google Gets, but not always.......

Search giant Google will propose today that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy to address growing concerns over how personal data is handled across the Internet.

Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will make the proposal at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Strasbourg, France, dealing with the intersection of technology with human rights and ethics.

Fleischer’s 30-minute presentation will advocate that regulators, international organizations and private companies increase dialog on privacy issues with a goal to create a unified standard.

Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London.

“We don’t want to be prescriptive about who does that and what those standards are because it should be a collaborative effort,” the spokesman said.

Other organizations have already made progress on privacy standards, he said. For example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) created a nine-point Privacy Framework designed to aid countries without existing policies.

However, the framework has been criticized for vagueness and only been partially implemented by APEC members, said David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum PLC.

E.U. privacy regulations are already more stringent than the APEC’s recommendations, which highlights the difficulty in creating a global standard that meets existing regulatory requirements in various geographic areas, he said.

“From Google’s viewpoint, they can’t expect the E.U. and those nations that have higher privacy standards to level down to the APEC standards,” Bradshaw said.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/09/14/privacy/index.php