IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Net, should generally be regarded as personal knowledge, the head of the European Union’s group of documents privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s notes protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Web search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online details protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or World Wide Web protocol, address “then it has to be regarded as personal goods.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many society regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always

be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Net cafes or offices are used by several public.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of “whois” Net sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal knowledge would have implications for how search engines record details.

Google led the pack by being the first final year to cut the duration it stored search info to 18 months. It additionally reduced the day limit on the cookies that gather data on how public use the Net from a default of 30 years to an motorized expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy data Center, or EPIC, said it was “absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the…

Original post by Chris Maxcer