Do search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, break privacy policies? The new issue was brought to the attention of the European Union data privacy regulators early this week, when Peter Scharr, Germany’s data protection commissioner, addressed to the European Parliament regarding such a possibility.

Privacy advocates believe the IP or Internet protocol address should be regarded as personal data, but Google maintains the idea that an user cannot be identified just by learning its IP, as this simply points to the location of the computer, which can often be at an office or Internet café, and not to the actual individual.

Scharr partly agrees that an IP may not always link to an individual in particular, but he says there have been exceptions to that and most people use the personal computer when they’re surfing the net, which brought to surface a series of “whois” sites. These sites are said to generate an identity, whether it’s a person or a company, for every IP introduced.

Google however firmly maintains its position, as Peter Fleisher, its global privacy counsel, said: “People (are) trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review … I can understand that people continue to peddle this theory in Europe after having lost in the United States,” referring to the observations of a Dutch parliamentarian, who accused them of trying to maintain a competitive advantage through having this type of data: “Having that much information is market power.”

To what extent will the search engine be affected by an unfavorable vote? Well, for starters, it will alter the way it stores data, and furthermore, it will interfere with accurate billing information for online ads (every click accounted for needs to come from a different IP, as advertisers pay for the number of different individuals viewing the ad, not for the number of total views).

In the given situation, Google was pointed out a real example of commitment to privacy, that of Microsoft, which relies its search on users logging in rather than on their IP address. Further discussions are to be held, as Google is also committed to proving that they have done nothing to break their users’ rights to privacy.