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Google to ‘Anonymize’ After 9 Months

Bob2002

ULTIMATE Member
After continued pressure from EU regulators, Google has once again revised its data retention policies, saying it will "anonymize" user IP addresses after 9 months.

On Monday, Google deputy counsel Nicole Wong announced the change during an online privacy panel discussion in Mountain View, California – though she initially avoided mention of the EU.

"About a year ago, in March 2007, we announced that we would limit the retention of [certain personal data] to 18 months," Wong told members of the Churchill Club, the well-known Silicon Valley business and technology organization. "We're now going to cut that 18 month retention period to 9 months.

"When we went down to 18 months...we could continue to innovate with our services while still protecting users. Our engineers have continued to work on the computer science problem around this, and they now think that after nine months, they can get most of the utility out of the data in our server logs, while giving better privacy protection."

Thankfully, a privacy watchdog was on hand to say that Google didn’t exactly reach this point on its own. "Google is certainly stepping in the right direction, but this came about in part because of pressure from European Union regulators, who have pushed hard on this issue over the past year," explained Jim Dempsey, vp of public policy with the Center for Democracy and Technology. "First, they pushed Google to specify 18 months and then they continued to push them to 9 months."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/09/google_nine_months_data_anonymization/

Perhaps "Don't be evil" should be the motto of the EU ? :hrmph:
 
Since I am beginning to view Google in a similar way to Phorm, I hope the EU continues to apply pressure on the UK govt over Phorm.
 
All a bit stable-doorish by now isn't it? The vast tracts of Googleyourself will have been gathered and widely distributed among fences, railway carriages and taxi ranks all over the country by now.
 
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Possibly, but that data will now be getting out of date.

Nowadays the only thing I use Google for is searching, and the occasional image seach. and I do neither that often.

No more Googlemail, Google earch, no Google toolbasr (or any other toolbar), no Chrome, no iGoogle.
 
I never could understand why people added those tool bars never used any regarddless of who's name was on them.
 
I never could understand why people added those tool bars never used any regarddless of who's name was on them.

Couldn't agree more. It's like saying "please feel free to take a look at my PC, log every action I take in my browser etc etc."

I wonder how many people up in arms about Phorm have these toolbars installed.


Back to Google - I wouldn't trust them to keep their word - they don't even know how long a years lasts...

About a year ago, in March 2007....

So a year lasts for 18 months!
 
I never could understand why people added those tool bars never used any regarddless of who's name was on them.

when they market them as some sort of protection against online fraud and other online nuisances.. its easy to tell why users who have no real tech skills install them.... when l was cleaning my sisters computer or sorting it out each weeki there would be a different search bar there, sometimes yahoo other times google, and other times ask jeeves and no matter how much l said dont install ld find one a week later..

the fact of the matter is when one is told it will protect them its just a ruse to make ppl think they are bring protected while they are being profiled.. AVG have their own one now.. which l disable on FireFox but lm stuck with it on IE but l dont use IE so who cares :).
 
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I never could understand why people added those tool bars never used any regarddless of who's name was on them.

Does Sun still try to get people to install Google toolbar when you go to download Java ? :shrug:
 
They might ask I still untick all toolbars, trust noone with your privacy not even the government now.
 
Doesn't Flash and acrobat downloads try to get you to install it too.

My dad's Laptop had an IE toolbar amongst the bundled software in the Vista Install - I think it was a yahoo one. Even if he knew what a toolbar was, had I not been there to set it up, I doubt he'd have removed it himself, in case he "broke something" :)
 
Yes, that's part of the trouble, isn't it? A lot of people, when they're told that item x is good for them, will just swallow the advertising garbage on the assumption that the company promoting it know better than they do, and/or that the thing they actually wanted won't work if they don't install this extra bit too.

Irrespective of privacy concerns, it's 99.99% junk as far as I'm concerned - wouldn't touch any of it.
 
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virtually everything asks you to download a toolbar if you download it online.. its a source of revenue for some progs l still think that they shouldnt be allowed to do it since sometimes they try to trick you with wording to install the addon.
 
If anyone here would like to clear them out and wants to find out how, they appear in the tool called HijackThis as BHO objects.

However some data protection programmes also use BHOs. SpyBot for exampe.

If you recognise the one and not the other, the one that has the name of your security tool in it should be kept and the one with no name (or a name you can not connect with a firewall, AV, or graphics card or whatever) then you just click the box for it and drop the dead donkey.

There are forums set up to deal with the tool:
"ASAP + HjT" will get you a list of them.

I wouldn't advise removing driver BHOs as they might be necessary for smooth running of Windows. But I rather suspect they would be just updaters -which if the thing is running OK, you might be better without.

Getting the latest updates for anything is risky with Windows as M$ code is rather scrambled. And Firmware even more so. You'd be better off waiting to hear reports of problems from the less cautious.
 
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