A decision on whether the world's number one search engine Google has violated European privacy laws is months away, according to a spokeswoman.Gabriele Loewnau made the revelation on behalf of Peter Schaar, chairman of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, suggesting the next meeting in June will not be the final discussion on the matter.
National protection supervisors from each of the EU's 27 member states make up the EU data watchdog body, which will decide in June whether or not Google should attend the meeting earmarked for October.
The EU body said in the letter to Google, which was made public on Thursday, that it was concerned about the length of time that it was holding on to data about people's searches.
"The new storage period of 18 to 24 months on the basis indicated by Google thus far does not seem to meet the requirements of the European legal data protection framework," the group highlighted.
"Concerning the Google cookie, the lifetime of this cookie, which has a validity of approximately 30 years, is disproportionate."
Google's privacy counsel Peter Fleischer recently told BBC News that elements of the company's privacy policy were vague, but insisted that privacy for users was fundamental to its service.
"We will never transfer to third parties, including advertisers, any personally identifiable information about our users," he commented.
"Our goal is to be as transparent as possible with our users when it comes to privacy. That transparency builds trust and we will succeed or fail on whether our users trust us."
In April 2007, bigmouthmedia published a survey that asked users which search engines they most trusted to keep records of their search behaviour private.
Google scored highest, with 38 per cent of respondents claiming to trust the search engine with their records. Yahoo! came in second at 23 per cent, while only 21 per cent of those surveyed expressed trust in MSN.
