Forum Moderators: phranque
IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet 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 data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address "then it has to be regarded as personal data."
Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.
EU: Your IP Is Personal [ap.google.com]
But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of "whois" Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.
Most whois searches on private person's IP addresses I do only tell me the ISP the person is using, not his name or physical location. This EU official doesn't have too much first hand experience with this issue I suggest.
There is an issue however that many broadband users are now assigned fixed IP addresses, where random IP addresses from a DHCP pool were the norm a few years ago. With help of the ISP, it is therefore now easier to trace a user with his IP address but it is not as easy as a single whois lookup.
And about Google's database in the second part of the article, Google's long term cookie is far more important in tracking individual user behaviour than the IP address, because the cookie also works over DHCP connections and even when travelling and surfing with a laptop.
