Overview
- Google publicly contested the proposal on Monday, saying an internal test showed anonymized search records can be re-identified in under two hours and warning that forced sharing would raise fraud and privacy risks.
- The European Commission’s April 16 draft would require Google to provide ranking, query, click and view data to third‑party search engines and AI services on fair, reasonable and non‑discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
- Google’s senior security leaders have argued that the granular nature of the data and modern AI linkage techniques make conventional anonymization unreliable for wide distribution.
- Google has started limited data licensing to meet parts of the Digital Markets Act but opposes broader mandatory sharing, and the Commission is preparing a legally binding decision for July with separate probes into possible self‑preferencing that could yield large fines.
- If regulators reject ordinary anonymization, the dispute could push Europe toward cryptographic fixes such as zero‑knowledge proofs or homomorphic encryption and change how users’ search behavior is stored and accessed by rivals.