Google Urges Un to Set Global Internet Privacy Rules

Google, the world's leading search engine, is calling on the United Nations to help protect the privacy of web surfers around the world before the internet faces a crisis of confidence.

The dot com company's privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, will address a conference in Strasbourg of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) today and ask for governments and businesses to agree on international privacy standards.

Mr Fleischer said the rise of the internet meant that vast amounts of information were being shipped around the globe, often to countries with no official data protection. Without a new set of rules to apply worldwide, surfers could lose confidence in the internet and hamper its development, he told the Guardian.

"Three quarters of the countries in the world have no privacy regimes at all and among those that do have laws, many of them were largely adopted before the rise of the internet," he said.

"It's said that every time you use a credit card, your details are passed through six different countries. We're talking about this to help set the framework for the internet of the future."

Mr Fleischer will address the problem at the Unesco meeting, which is focused on the ethics of working in an information-based society. The danger of failing to address privacy on a worldwide basis, he is expected to say, is that the internet's progress will be undermined by the rise in online crimes.

"A lot of data is being outsourced from Europe and the US to India, for example, but India doesn't have any privacy regulation. Europeans and Americans want to know their privacy is protected, and Indians themselves, as they come online, will also want these protections."

The company said it had already held discussions with some European privacy regulators, including those in Spain and France, and is encouraging either the United Nations or the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to take an active role in promoting global privacy standards.

Mr Fleischer said Google's aim was to improve the benchmark of regulation around the world, rather than reduce the level of privacy law in highly regulated environments such as Europe. But, he added, western officials needed to recognize the increasing importance of the internet if they were to protect their citizens properly.

Google has made several public moves with regard to its own privacy practices in recent months, including a reduction in the length of time that it keeps personal information on its customers. The shift comes as the web firm attempts to reconcile its mantra of "don't be evil" with its increasingly powerful business, and reposition itself as a champion of the ordinary internet user.

But despite such moves, the Silicon Valley company, which was started in a garage only nine years ago, has not managed to escape criticism of its own practices. Earlier this year the campaign group Privacy International said Google was "hostile to privacy" thanks to the large stores of information it holds on its users.

And just this week the company had a warning from Canadian privacy regulators over the street-level photography that it is adding to its popular mapping service.

Google Street View, which is currently only available for some American cities, is created by taking a sequence of urban photographs and then creating a virtual street-level image. Some of the pictures have included identifiable individuals, and the service has been attacked over its potential to invade personal privacy.

Canada's privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, said this week that she had written to Google over concerns that the system may be illegal in Canada. "I am concerned that, if the Street View application were deployed in Canada, it might not comply with our federal privacy legislation," she said in the letter.