Google rethinks search data privacy

Anonymising sooner

9 September 2008 13:12 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Google will cut the amount of time it keep user's search data, after the EU has put more pressure on the company.

Google has said it will now "anonymise" identifiable IP addresses on its server logs after nine months, three months longer than an EU advisory body recommended, but a lot less than the 24 months that Google wanted.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said: "Finding the right balance between data retention and privacy is a tough issue for policymakers, Google and our industry".

The company has also come under fire regarding the privacy policy for its new Chrome browser that sends search data back to Google as the user is typing in the browser's "Omnibox".

In a company blog post, a Google exec has revealed that the Suggest feature in not just Chrome, but the search engine too, will anonymise data within 24 hours:

"Given the concerns that have been raised about Google storing this information - and its limited potential use - we decided that we will anonymize it within about 24 hours (basically, as soon as we practically can)."

Full tags

Software, Google, Browsers, Search engines, Chrome