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The world's leader in Web search services, Google, faces mounting paranoia over the scope of its powers. In recent weeks, Google's privacy policies along with its plans to develop more personalized services have come under harsh scrutiny in some quarters. The European Union's Data Protection Working Group is examining how long the company retains identifiable data and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating its proposed three billion dollar acquisition of the internet advertising supplier Doubleclick. Google, the world leader in Web search services, is the focus of mounting paranoia over the scope of its powers as it expands into new advertising formats from online video to radio and TV, while creating dozens of new Internet services. As people spend more time online and realise just how much information Google is collecting about their habits and interests, the fear develops that true or false revelations of the most personal, embarrassing or even intrusive kind are no more than a Web search away. The company mission statement reads: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Privacy policy activists complain Google's $3.1 billion plan to acquire DoubleClick, which connects buyers and sellers of online advertising, would double the number of Internet users on which Google keeps tabs to upward of one billion. For several years now, friends, enemies and first-time daters have had to face up to the inconvenient truths that turn up with a little Web snooping -- dubbed Google-stalking. Just by searching on Google for the names of ex-lovers, schoolmates, or people they have just met, they can find out more about them than they bargained for. And Google is testing various forms of personalized Web search, including Web History, a feature that allows individual users to look back at a chronological history of their search activity over several years. Google has initiated a plan to limit the amount of time the company stores personal data to no more than two years across its massive collection of hundreds of thousands of computers. The proposal spurred debate with privacy regulators in the European Union. Google last week agreed to scale back its data retention plans to 18 months. It argues that everything from spell-checking on its Web search service to anti-fraud protections to government data retention laws won't work over any shorter timeframe. Rivals have not set time limits on storing personal data. Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said "You know the privacy regulators are asking the question how long should a company like Google retain data and it's a valid question. We have announced a policy we will anonimize our server logs after 18 months. Our users will have a finite retention period. We looked at what other companies in the industry do and none of them have a finite retention period so we are the leading company in this phase.. It was suggested in Britain's Independent newspaper that Google is attempting to create the most comprehensive data base of personal information ever asssembled. Fleischer responded: We believe in putting our users in charge and we will build our service so the users have a choice about how to use it. Take that particular example. User can go up to Google and do a classic search, walk up to the computer, type in a search term and get results. These results will be statistical results, the best we can access. We also have a different version of search called personalized search that a user has to choose to use, has to open a Google account, has to enter a password and with that version of search we will keep a record of their searches in the past, web sites they may have visited and we can personalize results to them. A report by the London-based privacy international group accused Google of being "the most hostile to data protections of any major internet company". Fleischer said it was a shame the company was not given an opportunity to comment on the report before it was published as it contained many inaccuracies.