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Google has been under spotlights in the past few months due to several issues regarding privacy, specially in the UK and other European countries. The search engine giant has been trying to address all the issues by answering those accusations. Also Google has made the privacy evident with their new homepage redesign. This may be due to their commitment towards making things as clear as possible or maybe they are forced to do so in order to stay away from trouble.
Now Google has announced their latest policy regarding logs retention according to which the IP addresses will be anonymized on the search engine giant’s server logs after 9 months.
Earlier last year, Google was the leading search engine that announced a policy to anonymize their search server logs for the sake of privacy. Others in the industry also followed Google’s footsteps. Over the last couple of years, the search engine giant has been frequently questioned by the authorities in the U.S. and Europe regarding their logs detention policy. In response the company issued an open letter.
A number of privacy groups have mentioned the risk of petitioners using the court order in order to gain access to logs, just like the recent case of Viacom which Google handled and the case was eventually solved.
To answer that, Google has also issued a response to the European privacy authorities. The company has had discussion with hundreds of privacy officials including data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates through out the world, since the release of their policy of anonymizing original logs. This is to let others know about the privacy practices of the company and work with them to extend ways of improvement.
According to Google’s official blog:
When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas. We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.
Further more the blog reads:
After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data’s utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven’t sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.
The company do have some concerns regarding the security, quality and innovation. On this, the company says:
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. So, it’s difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other.
