You’ve probably seen more gracious behavior from 6-year-olds who have lost a game of Monopoly. Still, even if the company’s not thrilled about it, Google’s agreed to take new steps to protect users’ privacy.
The main development relates to anonymizing IP addresses on corporate server logs after nine months instead of eighteen. It’s no secret that the EU regulators and other watchdogs pushed Google on this point for a long time.
A less whiny part of a post on the Official Google Blog explains, “While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows.”
Meh. The other present to privacy advocates is tied to Google Suggest. A second official post states, “To provide its recommendations Google Suggest needs to know what you’ve already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don’t log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.”
Soon that data will be anonymized within about 24 hours of the time it’s received.
It’s anybody’s guess what the Department of Justice and Sandy Litvack will make of this.
