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Data privacy is a fundamental human right, not only according to the EU perspective. Each EU state implements sophisticated data protection acts. Nevertheless, there are frequent media reports on data privacy violations. The scientific and the political community assumes that data protection acts suffer from a lack of enforcement. This paper is an interdisciplinary study that examines this hypothesis by means of empirical facts on juridical assessment criteria -and validates it. We have inspected 100 service providers, from social online platforms to web shops. Our study considers legal requirements of the privacy policy and how providers ask for consent and react to requests for information or deletion of personal data. Our study is based on articles of German law that have a counterpart in the EU Directive 95/46/EC. Thus, our study is relevant for all EU states and all countries with similar regulations.

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The revenue of search-engine providers strongly depends on targeted advertisement. Targeted advertisement is becoming more reliant on personal data. This puts user privacy at risk. One way to improve privacy is to anonymize search logs, but this reduces usefulness for ad placement. Further, the usefulness depends on the target function used for the anonymization. This paper is the first to study this tradeoff systematically. We quantify the usefulness of an anonymized search log for advertisement purposes, by estimating outcomes such as the number of clicks on ads or the number of ad impressions possible after anonymization. A main result is that anonymized search logs are still useful for advertisement purposes, but the extent strongly depends on the target function.