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Google has faced particular resistance in Europe to its policy of retaining users’ search history to improve search results, but comments made by Sergei Brin and Larry Page to journalists at a Google conference in Hertfordshire seemed designed to identify others as the bigger threat to internet users’ privacy.

Information posted on social networking sites, such as photographs of young people at drunken parties, “pop up and punch you days or even years later,” Mr Brin said. “That’s the thing that drives the issue” of online privacy concerns, he argued.

Asked about companies that take users’ search and browsing histories and interpret them to improve the targeting of online advertising, Mr Brin said: “I think there’s a lot of things you can do in a creepy way that kind of scare people.

While defending the value of users’ information for refining search results, he added: “Some companies have aggressively pursued a very commercial orientation in a creepy, scary way. That’s an issue I think which is a setback for the industry.”