One of the oft cited concerns towards search engine giant Google is the fact that it has access to mountains upon mountains of potentially confidential user data. From email to documents to even web browsing, Google potentially has its arms in every part of person's digital life. Today, the company announced on their blog a new measure to protect its users' privacy: Google has cut its old 18 month IP address retention policy to only 9 months, after which it will anonymize the IP addresses on the server logs. The move comes after several months of discussions with both US and EU privacy regulators.

Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google, wrote on the company blog: "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."

Posted: Sep 11, 2008 10:44 am