The first European privacy seal was presented on Monday to search engine ixquick.com by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx. This officially makes Ixquick the first and only search engine that is fully compliant with EU laws and regulations on privacy and data security.
The first European Privacy Seal goes to a search engine.(IMG:J.Anderson)
The European Privacy Seal guarantees that IT products and services comply with the demanding EU laws and regulations on privacy and data security. The award is issued by EuroPriSe, a consortium of nine privacy organizations backed by the European Commission. Under the scheme, IT products and IT-based services are audited in order to see if they can be certified as compliant with European regulations on privacy and data security. It uses a two-step procedure: first, an evaluation of the product or service by accepted legal and IT experts, followed by a cross-checking of the evaluation report by an accredited certification body.
Privacy on the Internet is increasingly under attack, as searches and visits are routinely recorded and combined into personal and behavioral profiles by search engines and other websites. Potential implications of these privacy violations are misused personal data, identity theft, harassment, or even criminal usage.
This is what led Ixquick to become the first to delete privacy details like IP-addresses within 48 hours and abolish the use of ID cookies in 2006. "This award sends out a very strong message to our users," said Ixquick's CEO Robert Beens. "It is the ultimate proof that we live up to our promises."
Ixquick is a meta-search engine which forwards search requests of its users to several search engines, gathers and combines their results, and presents the results to the requesting users. Privacy is ensured by using several data-minimization techniques: personal data like IP addresses are deleted within 48 hours, after which they are no longer needed to prevent possible abuse of the servers. The remaining (non-personal) data is deleted within 14 days. Ixquick serves as a proxy, i.e. IP addresses of users are not disclosed to other search engines.
“By introducing transparent and verifiable procedures, supervised by independent authorities, EuroPriSe provides a reliable privacy trust mark for end-users of IT Services,” says Dr. Thilo Weichert, Data Protection Commissioner for Germany's northernmost state and head of the ULD.
“More than 120 experts from the various EU countries have already been trained to work with the EuroPriSe criteria and more than 40 experts have successfully completed the admission procedure and have been granted the right to offer evaluations for IT products and services according to the European Privacy Seal criteria,” said Kirsten Bock, EuroPriSe Project Manager. There are more on the way, as eighteen companies from six countries are participating in the pilot certifications and further companies have started the evaluation process.
“The European Commission welcomes the set-up of a uniform European Privacy Seal certification scheme based on the high European Privacy Standards. Customers and enterprises benefit from easy identification of an IT product as ensuring or enhancing European Data Protection rules in the processing of data. The award of the first European Privacy Seal to the meta-search engine Ixquick underlines that a balance between the open nature of the internet, providers´ interests and the protection of personal data of internet users is possible.” said EU Commissioner Viviane Reding in a statement delivered on Monday during the award ceremony.
View blog reactions
There are currently no comments for this article. Be the first to comment! (no registration required)
Advertising
There are currently no comments for this article. Be the first to comment! (no registration required)