Legal Commentary

Google reduces personal info retention times

By David Canton

David Fraser points out that Google has announced that they are reducing the time before they anonymize IP addresses on their server logs from 18 months to 9 months.   That’s in reponse to privacy regulators.

Google’s blog entry on the point is a good read as it discusses the trade-off’s between privacy and the advantages they see from keeping the info longer. 

It states in part:

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.

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. Technology will certainly evolve, and we will always be working on ways to improve privacy for our users, seeking new innovations, and also finding the right balance between the benefits of data and advancement of privacy.

Read David’s post

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).