Via Crooked Timber: “Google is staking a claim on the moral high ground of Internet privacy. The company has called for new international rules, ostensibly to protect privacy online. Little of Google’s search information is strictly ‘personal data’, i.e. data directly concerning named individuals. But search data, potentially tied to individuals’ IP numbers, is dynamite, something it’s taken Google a long time to face up to publicly. ”

As really serious bloggers are wont to say, Read The Whole Thing.

Money Quote: “It can’t be controversial to infer from all this that in the current climate, any changes to data protection will focus more on accommodating business and law enforcement concerns than privacy ones. Opening up data protection negotiations anywhere – in the EU, at the OECD or at some UN forum to be imagined – can only have the effect of weakening existing protections.”