Here’s an interesting development — a search engine that really takes privacy seriously.

The first European privacy seal was presented today to search engine ixquick.com by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of data protection legislation in Schleswig-Holstein.

According to the citation:

Ixquick is a meta-search engine which forwards search requests of its users to several search engines, gathers and combines their results and presents the results to the requesting users. Privacy is ensured by using several data-minimization techniques: personal data like IP addresses are deleted within 48 hours, after which they are no longer needed to prevent possible abuse of the servers. The remaining (non-personal) data are deleted within 14 days. Ixquick serves as a proxy, i.e. IP addresses of users are not disclosed to other search engines.

Hmmm… Bet that won’t appeal to the British Home Office.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.