Google has faced down one European probe into what it does with people’s personal information, only to be challenged with another.

Last October, privacy watchdogs in Norway, which is not part of the European Union but has identical data protection laws, asked Google to justify why it retains people’s search histories for up to two years. Google refused to co-operate.

Peter Fleischer, the Google privacy lawyer who met with Norwegians on the understanding that it would not accept their authority, has presented Google’s justification for its data retention on Google’s blog.

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One reason was to comply with regulations including the European Data Retention Directive, which was passed in 2005 but does not have to be passed into national law until 2009.

EU member states have the scope to demand companies retain communications data for between six months and two years as an aid in terrorist and criminal investigations.

But the directive explicitly excludes the “content” of communications, under which moniker European regulators include search histories.

The directive requires phone and internet firms to retain “data necessary to trace and identify” a communication source, destination, date, time, duration, type, device and location.

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