Towards Personalised Search: EU Data Protection Law and its Implications for Media Pluralism.

At present, we are witnessing a growing trend towards search engine personalisation. First, search engines increasingly enable users to tailor their search experience to their liking and needs. Second, by logging the users' search behaviour and building user profiles, search engine operators are working on improving their ability to automatically generate relevant and personalised hits for each individual user. Ideally, this means that your search engine will soon provide you with highly personalised search results. Personalisation gives rise to two separate policy and legal issues. First, to what extent are the search engines' logging activities in line with EU data protection law, and, second, what is the consequence of search engine personalisation as regards media concentration and media pluralism? This paper argues that these two questions are in fact intertwined, and considers the key role of EU data protection law in furthering media pluralism, in an age of increased personalisation of search.JRC.J.4-Information Societ