Google has revised its privacy policy so that it will no longer keep your search results indefinitely.

At the moment when you do a search on Google.com, the company collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Google’s previous policy was to keep this data for as long as it was felt it was useful.

Since each Internet connection has an individual IP address, it is theoretically possible to trace Google searches to individual computer users. Many people felt uncomfortable about this, particularly civil libertarians, and of course cheats and porn addicts, who worried that one day Google’s search results could fall into the wrong hands.

Once Google implements its new policy change, it will anonymize its server logs after a 18 to 24 to months.

“We will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months,” wrote Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel on Google’s official blog.

“We think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s 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. Of course, you can always choose to have us retain this data for more personalized services like Search History. But that’s up to you.”

Google’s engineers are already working on implementing the technical changes to Goofle, and the company hopes to implement its new data policy within the next 12 months.

Until then, be aware that any dubious search you’ve ever conducted on Google could, in theory, fall into your wife’s or girlfriend’s hands. But at least now you only have to sweat for another 12 months or so.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:28 am under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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