Google promises to become more forgetful
By John Lister
Google is to halve the period it stores personal data about its users to nine months. It’s believed the change is a response to pressures from European regulators.
The news emerged at a meeting of privacy experts hosted by Microsoft. Google lawyers later confirmed the changes in a post on the company’s blog. They said picking the right amount of time to store such details was a balance between privacy and providing the best technical performance.
The post also hints that Google may have to change the way it makes data anonymous as part of the change, particularly given the firm’s anti-fraud strategies. And while the blog posters don’t outright say so, it’s pretty clear they have little intention of cutting the nine-month period any further.
In an official response to European Union privacy regulators, Google says it has also added a link from its home page to its privacy policy. It claims this was a direct reaction to an EU request, which will come as a surprise to California officials who looked at complaints that the missing link was a violation of state law. Despite the apparent Euro-based pressure, the changes will affect Google’s sites worldwide.
Google is also changing the data collection policy for from its suggestion feature, which looks at what users have typed and suggests other suitable search terms. At the moment 2% of the data collected this way is retained, but the firm will now delete this information after 24 hours.
Privacy campaigner Ari Schwartz explained to CNN that there are always likely to be privacy problems with firms like Google. He says this is because engineers always want to retain as much data as possible, but other staff will find it difficult to know how much of that data is genuinely needed for engineering purposes.
There’s been no word yet from Microsoft or Yahoo on whether they’ll reduce their data-retention periods from 18 and 13 months respectively.
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