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:























