Attacked for its own privacy policy, internet search engine leader Google has called on governments and business to agree to a basic set of global privacy rules, to safeguard the health of internet from risk.

Peter Fleischer, privacy chief, Google Inc told a Unesco conference in Strasbourg that growing internet usage had led to vast amounts of personal data being regularly shipped around the globe, which often passed through countries with insufficient or no data protection laws, he said.

Fleischer said every time people used their credit card their information could cross six or seven national boundaries and three quarters of countries did not have privacy rules at all. Even among countries that do have privacy protection laws, they were largely adopted before the rise of the internet.

He pointed out that Europe''s strict privacy regulations were framed in 1995, largely before the rise of the commercial internet, while the US has no countrywide privacy laws, instead leaving such safeguards to individual states or even industries.

He noted that the minority of the world''s countries that have privacy regimes followed divergent models and (as a result) citizens were the losers because they were unsure about their rights.

In the past Google itself has been accused for violating individual privacy. In June this year, Privacy International ranked the search giant as being "hostile" to user privacy in a ranking of web businesses on their treatment of users'' personal data.

It slammed Google for installing cookies on users computers when they visited a website that led the giant to limit the life of such cookies to auto-delete after two years of the users last visit to its site from a life till 2038 previously.

Fleischer mooted that governments adopt principles that some Asia-Pacific countries from Vietnam to Australia had agreed to. He was referring to the nine principles adopted by the APEC countries to protect individual privacy from data violation.

If such safeguards could be agreed to by such a diverse group of nations, they could be agreed to the rest of the world as well Fleischer observed.