January 24, 2008

German Data Protection Commissioner Says IP Addresses Are Personal Information

BRUSSELS, Belgium — 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. A privacy advocate at EPIC said it was "absurd" for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations. "It's one of the things that make computer people giggle," EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told The Associated Press.

EU Official: IP Is Personal, Associated Press, January 22, 2008.