Brussels, 22/06/2007 (Agence Europe) - European data protection experts, members of the “Article 29” working party, said on Thursday evening that they were going to extend their investigation to include companies other than Google, to find out how internet search engines held information on their users. The Article 29 working party, an independent consultative European body specialising in data protection, last month considered the data protection policy of Google Inc (see EUROPE 9433). The group will now “deal with search engines in general, and scrutinise their activities from a data protection point of view,” it said in a press release, after its meeting on 19-20 June. The world's best known search engines are AltaVista, Google, AskJeeves, AlltheWeb, MSN Search and Yahoo Search. The data retained by such companies includes key words, IP address and cookie details. There is concern that this information could be used to identify individuals, or even to build up precise profiles. Google has decided to reduce the amount of time it retains its internet users' search data from two years to 18 months. Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said last week that the American company's decision was a good step (see EUROPE 9446). The data protection experts will now draw up a detailed letter, probably at the group's next meeting in the autumn, to respond to the letter sent to them by Google. (bc)