Although search companies have taken significant steps to improve on consumer privacy protection, “comprehensive” federal legislation still is needed to protect web users from “bad actors,” the Center for Democracy and Technology asserted in a report issued this week.

Although the report acknowledged that several major search engines recently have announced policies that “begin to place control of sensitive information back into the hands of users, limiting the risk that consumers’ personal data will be misused, lost, stolen or otherwise compromised,” the CDT concluded that such self-regulation will never be sufficient by itself.

“No amount of self regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actors,” the CDT stated in its report. “With consumers sharing more data than ever before online, the time has come to harmonize our nation’s privacy laws into a simple, flexible framework.”

The report included a chart comparing the p