By Dan Goodin in San Francisco for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
The search giant will scrub personal information from cookies
and remove some of the bits in IP addresses after that information
has been stored for a set period of time, probably 18 to 24 months,
a Google official wrote in a company blog. It expects to roll out the new policy by
the end of the year.
Until now, Google has kept information that can link specific
searches to individual users indefinitely, potentially providing a
trove of data to prosecutors or rogue employees with the proper
credentials. Google will continue to log and store user activity
but will anonymize it after a period of time. Google said the plan
would be altered if laws governing the retention of data required
it.
The change is sure to be welcomed by privacy advocates, who have
been aghast at the permeability of the walls containing search data
that can easily identify those who make the requests. Last year,
AOL touched off a firestorm when it published 19m search queries
made by more than 650,000 users. AOL had taken steps to anonymize
the data, but some searches contained intimate information that
allowed readers to identify the requesters. AOL had revealed the
data as part of a research project.
Prior to that, the US Department of Justice, working on a case
involving child pornography, issued subpoenas demanding several
search engines surrender huge amounts of information related to
searches. While Yahoo!, MSN and AOL largely caved, Google fought
the demand, arguing it would violate user privacy. (The search
king, perhaps more transparently, also objected on the grounds that
the disclosure would reveal proprietary
algorithms.) Google lost part of its bid, and now wisely
believes a better tack to take is to discard some of the vast
amounts of information it collects.
Google said its decision to continue hording identifying
information for as long as two years was an attempt to strike
harmony among conflicting goals of personalizing its services,
safeguarding user privacy, and complying with data retention laws
throughout the world.
© The Register
2007
