I was on holiday in Spain for the past two weeks with my family, and though I normally endeavour to keep writing this column I found it impossible, since the people we were staying with did not have the Internet at all.

Which I guess was strange, since they have a 12-year-old son. It was not a matter of price. They owned three houses, one of which is a colonial style mansion where we stayed. I guess there decision to not have the Internet in the house is out of principle, the same reason they severely restrict their son from viewing television.

Perhaps it is too soon in this world to expect the Internet in every home, just like a telephone or a cell phone. I was still stumped, out in the heat of the Spanish sun, about the lack of a connection. But in fact, after five days I did not even notice the lack. It was just drinks, lots of serrano ham and friends.

Now, that was simpler to do that I thought. I did not get withdrawal symptoms. I did not run into the village looking for a connection. I did not sulk or say that I would look something up immediately. I had an Internet free vacation. Too bad about the 300 emails that piled up in the meantime.

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In my column of June 30, I praised the EU for going ahead with revising its data protection rules to better protect citizens. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, said the Commission was looking into rules that would provide a 'a right to be forgotten', which would allow Internet users to correct, withdraw or delete personal information at will.

I noted that I believed that the principle could serve as a manifesto for guarding privacy in today's world and called on the Bermuda Government to move ahead on personal data protection legislation.

A spokesperson from the Department of E-Commerce contacted me to say that Government is in the process of developing a 'Personal Information Protection Act' and that meetings were being held with a working party of "relevant stakeholders".

The working party is operating under a Cabinet memorandum that authorises the ministry to develop the legislation with an expected date for presentation to the House early in 2011. The draft legislation will soon be circulated to the general public for a period of public consultation, he said.

"The legislation draws on that found in a number of other jurisdictions and seeks to find a balance between the US sectoral approach and the omnibus approach of the EU," the spokesperson continued. "This is being done so that the economic interests of Bermuda are not prejudiced while a suitable level of protection is granted to individuals."

The reference to the "economic interests of Bermuda" is what has held this legislation up for more than a decade. Back then, Government was concerned about the tough new EU data protection laws which prevented EU companies from sending personal data overseas to places that did not have the same or similar level of protection.

Bermuda's companies seemed to have survived those laws or have made the necessary commitments to personal data protection to satisfy EU concerns. But what about the personal data of Bermudians? While one can believe that no one is in any immediate danger of having their personal data held on servers used in ways they do not want, one would still like to say that information is protected and under their personal control.

Citizen groups should watch the process of developing this legislation carefully, lest their concerns are subsumed by the interests of those other "relevant stakeholders", especially during the public consultation. I await with interest to see what this middle ground will look like.

The folly of relying on one search engine, Google, can be seen through a study of the internet research strategies of US college students. The study, conducted by Northwestern University, found that students overwhelmingly relied on Google for their research, and many seemed to give too much credibility to the first results listed at the top of the page.

For the study, 102 students were asked to read an excerpt of a play for class, write a resume or find the e-mail address of a politician. Overwhelmingly they trusted Google so much that many only clicked on websites that turned up at the top of Google searches to complete assigned tasks. The study was published by the International Journal of Communication.

"Many students think, 'Google placed it number one, so, of course it's credible'," said Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern. "This is potentially tricky because Google doesn't rank a site by its credibility."

Aside from Google, other online brands that students mentioned most often to complete tasks were: Yahoo!, SparkNotes, MapQuest, Microsoft, Wikipedia, AOL and Facebook. Some of the students did give more credibility to websites ending in dot-gov, dot-edu or dot-org, but many did not know dot-org domain names could be registered by anyone, and thus are not inherently different from dot-com sites.

There is a lesson here for teachers: "Just because younger people grew up with the web doesn't mean they're universally savvy with it," said Hargittai. "Educators should show specific websites in class and talk about why a source is or isn't credible."

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com