14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced on its official blog that, following the concerns expressed by privacy regulators in Europe and US, it will anonymize IPs in the server search logs after 9 months instead of 18. After being the first major search engine to clearly specify a retention time for IPs of 18 months, Google claims that the new change will demonstrate once again the company's commitment to data protection and users' privacy.
Google's decision to anonymize IPs in the search logs after 18 months was also implemented by the other search engines, although the privacy advocates and government leaders continued to ask the Mountain View giant to justify the necessity of this retention time in detail. The announcement explains that this data was and still is critical to the process of innovation. "When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations," the announcement notes.
In a response to the EU authorities, Google explains that it has been working closely with Irish Data Protection Commissioner, Mr. Billy Hawkes, at the company's European headquarters in Dublin in order to address their concerns. The search giant has complied with one of the requests regarding the presence of a link to the Privacy Policy on its home page and has provided one for all localized versions of the Google website.
It is also noted that Google's engineers have been hard at work to find a way to limit the loss in logs data quality while further reducing the retention time of IPs. The company uses this data to produce better search results and more relevant advertisement campaigns based on the user's location and language preferences. Its current conclusion is that, while the anonymization methods will suffer changes, the time can be reduced to 9 months. "After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data's utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work," the announcement points out.
Even so, the company still has concerns regarding the constant pressure from the authorities regarding strict privacy regulations, because "it's difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other."