Google, which has time and again fought fire for unprecedented access to user information, will reportedly now propose a uniform global privacy standard at an upcoming UNESCO conference in Strasbourg this week.

At the high level meeting of international policy makers, Global Privacy Counsel for Google, Peter Fleischer, will call on national regulators to adopt as global standard -- a basic set of global privacy protections.

Fleischer voiced the view that such a standard is a must for the health of the Internet, as well as that of the global economy, and Google's own business.

The current scenario, according to him, is one wherein the majority of countries offer practically no privacy standards to their citizens and businesses, and the minority is constituted by countries who do have privacy rules -- but all following different and often conflicting models.

To Fleischer, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework represents the best balance of principles governing the use of personal data in an essentially commercial context. The APEC framework comprises a set of 9 guidelines -- all focusing on tenets such as prevention of harm to individual privacy, safeguards on data collection, user notification, access to- and correction of- inaccurate data, and commercial use of private information.

Meanwhile, it's ironic that a company which goes about organizing the world's information with allegedly little or no regard for user privacy, should aspire to take position as defender of a global privacy standard.

The industry is not then to blame if it views the move with cynicism rather than enthusiasm, looking at Google more as a company buying time to bail itself out of the very many privacy issues it faces while making ineffective cries for global privacy standards...