In a move to appease officials of the European Union, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has announced that it will again shorten the amount of time it keeps individual user statistics. Previously, Google kept user data indefinitely. It then shortened the time frame to a maximum of two years. Now, Google has again announced a reduction in the data retention time frame to a maximum of 18 months, but Google's privacy attorney Peter Fleischer, in a letter to a group of officials advising the European Union on privacy policy, cautioned that the time frame may need to be increased again to conform with future data retention laws.
So, when thinking about Google and what data it may or may not be keeping about you, bear in mind that in some ways it is duty bound by law to keep those records. Not all data retention issues are decided at Google's home office. Google knows full well that for its own consumer profiling purposes a 120 day time frame is quite sufficient to create a profile that would successfully outline a consumer's habits and enable Google to then provide personalized data returns based on those usage habits.
If you're nervous about what data may be kept regarding your internet usage habits, you're better served by taking "Big Brother" to task about it rather than Google. In most instances, it's a matter of government regulation and it's not just a Google issue.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-15-2007 @ 5:06AM
Alex van Eesteren said...
Privacy concerns are becoming a major social and legal issue these days.
Search engines play an important role in the whole equation.
The AOL Privacy Breach last year is just one example of what can happen if search engine user-data are being stored.
Meta-search engine Ixquick.com's simple solution: "If the data is not stored, users privacy can't be breached”.
We are the first search engine to stop recording any privacy details of our users.
Some background information:
-Ixquick is a meta search engine, developed in 1998 in NY.
-It offers a simultaneous search in up to 12 of the best search engines.
-Ixquick will not share IP addresses with these individual search engines while searching.
-Ixquick will delete the IP addresses of the users within 48 hrs.
In fact we have a program running which opens the log files, deletes the user related IP
addresses and overwrites the "old" logfile. Also we took away the unique ID out of our
Cookies, the Cookie is only used for remembering the settings on the user's PC. We even
overwrite the "old" Cookie if a user has one on his PC from before this privacy initiative.
Read more on how Ixquick protects Privacy on: http://ixquick.com/eng/protect_privacy.html
Conclusion:
www.ixquick.com offers its users a high quality web search without storing any privacy data...
Best regards,
Alex van Eesteren
Ixquick.com