Google slashes time to search anonymity by half

Google has taken steps to improve privacy by reducing the time it holds onto data gained from users of its search service.

The search giant has said it will now anonymise IP addresses on its server logs after nine months rather than the previous 18 months.

A posting on the official Google Blog by the company's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer; senior privacy counsel, Jane Horvath; and software engineer, Alma Whitten, said the step was taken to address regulatory concerns and improve the privacy of users.

The decision to cut the time before logs are anonymised comes after EU and US regulators have repeatedly asked the company to explain and justify its logs retention policy.

Despite privacy concerns over the use of logs, Google maintains it uses the data to make improvements in the quality of search, boost security and combat fraud and spam.

Google has not always imposed a limit on the time it can hold such data. In March 2007, the company said it would anonymise its search server logs after 18 months after previously being able to maintain the search data logs indefinitely.

The blog said: "Since we announced our original logs anonymisation policy, we have had literally hundreds of discussions with data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates around the world to explain our privacy practices and to work together to develop ways to improve privacy. When we began anonymising after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas. We believed further reducing the period before anonymising would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users."

It added: "We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymising as we do after 18 months but we are committed to making it work."