Be Good for Goodness Sake: Search Engines in Europe
The EU Working Party responsible for implementing Europe's Data Protection Directive, i.e. the infamous European privacy laws issued an opinion this month found that the EU privacy directive covers a broad range of garden variety search engine activities, e.g. long term caching (a la the Internet Archive), search histories (like the material subpoenaed by the US government at the end of 2007), and collection of IP addresses. The Working Party also noted that behavioral advertising may not be permissible without users' consent.
This could hamstring the next generation interactive advertising and, even some garden variety website activities. One more reason to use care if you're a US company moving into another jurisdiction.
