Google uses Swine Flu as spurious reason to store user data

Blimey - a piece in the Grauniad about how its the small guys who suffer from ISP traffic metering, not Google, and now this - Google PR has been busy . From the BBC:

Forcing Google to delete user data after six months could dent its ability to predict pandemics such as swine flu, said the search giant's co-founder.

Larry Page said he thought more debate was needed around the issue of storing user data.

The European Commission wants data ditched after six months but Mr Page said there were benefits to users.

"More dialogue is needed [with regulators]," he told UK journalists at a Google event in Hertfordshire.

I'll bet he did. Google has been fiercely resisting attempts to get it to curtail it's user data storage to 6 months, this is yet another sally in its PR campaign. But trying to use Scary!Death!Danger! tactics of a very rare thing to justify the massive minute by minute intrusion on millions of people's data is, at the very least, diverting. Also, its not clear how having 18 months user data on tap would help predict swine flu over the 4 weeks it happened. Google could just as easily just log the historical metadata (eg "flu" searches by say location and time, and delete the user data)

I was a bit disappointed by the BBC piece as it didn't really look into the opposing arguments, just repeated Googlespeak. Lets trust the EU doesn't also get bamboozled by this sort of feint.