Legal Research

Where We At With Anonymizing Google?

Danny Sullivan has written an excellent status report for Google’s program for anonymizing user data.  Key points:

• Google is anonymizing only the last octet of the IP address with zeros, i.e. 12.345.678.000.  This is a compromise between privacy on the one hand, and, on the other, having enough of the IP address in order to do geolocation.

• Google continues to anonymize data after 18 months, even though they announced a 9-month schedule just a few weeks ago.

• Data from December 2006-March 2007 has been anonymized.  Google is anonymizing backwards, as well as forwards.

• Google uses a different, randomly-generated key each day to anonymize cookies.  Thus, the same user’s anonymized cookies on any two days cannot be linked together.  (Guess they learned from AOL’s oopsie.)

• If you’re logged into Google, forget the last 4 bullet points.  Google knows what you’re doing, period.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 14, 2008 (boomark / email).