Google Slashes Data-Retention Policy in Half
In the face of heavy pressure from privacy advocates, Google on Monday announced a new policy on retention of data.The latest privacy plan centers on a promise to anonymize IP addresses on Google’s server 
logs after nine months. That slashes the data-retention policy in half to — as Google explained it — address regulatory concerns and take another step to improve privacy for its users. But Google is not saying how it is making the addresses anonymous.
“Over the last two years, policy-makers and regulators — especially in Europe and the U.S. — have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs-retention policy,” said a Google blog post attributed to Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer, Senior Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath, and software engineer Alma Whitten.
“We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation,” they continued. “Some in the community of EU data-protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.”
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Add comment September 10th, 2008
