This Wednesday Google notified that it would take steps to anonymize the surfing habits of millions of Web users. Personal information stored in cookies and some of the bits in IP addresses will be removed. Google will continue to log and store the user activity and it will anonymize it after a short period of time. Company representatives said the plan would be altered if it were required by laws governing the retention of data. The information has bee kept because it can link specific searches to individual users indefinitely, and thus providing a trove of data to prosecutors or rogue employees with the proper credentials. The promisse to make personal data anonymous comes as a response to fears expressed by privacy advocates and some government regulators in the United States and Europe, after a period of up to two years. In addition AOL had taken steps to anonymize the data, but some searches contained intimate information that allowed readers to identify the requesters, but they revealed the data as part of a research project.
The US Department of Justice in a case involving child pornography, issued subpoenas demanding several search engines to offer huge amounts of information related to searches. Among the search engines that ptovided such information were Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Google argued that it would violate user privacy, and that the disclosure would make public some of its proprietary algorithms. Google now believes that it`s better to discard some of the vast amounts of information it collects.
Quoting from Google Blog: "After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the U.S., we're pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy. By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think weÆre striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve GoogleÆs services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices. In the future, it's possible that data retention laws will obligate us to retain logs for longer periods."
The Company is taking additional steps to design privacy protections for other Google products. The new feature included in the Google Talk instant message system will be "off the record" and it will make it easyer for users to disable the automatic archiving of conversations. Also there will be available a "pause" feature in its Google Desktop software. The policy is said to be implemented within the next year.