Google Solves Privacy Issue

I was accusing Google earlier of not taking any official stance against the privacy controversy that drove the Web crazy for the last few days. Well now Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel came forth and announced what course of action they took. Well better late than never, here's a fragment of his declaration:

“After considering the Working Party's concerns, we are announcing a new policy: to anonymize our search server logs after 18 months, rather than the previously-established period of 18 to 24 months. We believe that we can still address our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with this shorter period. However, we must point out that future data retention laws may obligate us to raise the retention period to 24 months.”

If you're interested you can find the whole response in PDF format here.

So what they're saying is that they lowered the time logs are kept on their servers from 2 years to 1 year and a half, and not even the the data is not deleted, it's just "anonymized". To be frank this is not the kind of response I expected from Google, but I guess they couldn't just drop all data gathered from users.

I know Google has a lot on its hands lately, such as the recent problems with Google Reader accounts loosing feeds, the launching of the new "View as Slideshow" feature in Gmail and many more, but I think this not something Google can afford to ignore. As for the last part of Fleischer's statement, the one that states law will make everybody to raise the retention period to 24 months, is talking about the Data Retention Directive that must be implemented by EU governments before 2009.

Until then, the current solution applied by Google will suffice.

By: Roberto Bell

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Barbara D. Williams writes articles on topics such as Fastest Web Browser Google Chrome and Google Launches Mashup Editor Visit Google solves privacy issue.