Bowing to pressure from European Union regulators, Google announced that it would anonymize IP addresses on its server logs after 9 months, effectively halving the amount of data it kept under its previous 18-month retention policy. In the blog announcing the change, however, Google complained that the data reduction could affect its ability to provide quality searches, as well as to innovate and prevent fraud. Still, Google says it’s agreed to make the change to alleviate privacy qualms, especially those voiced by the EU, even though it will provide only “incremental privacy benefits to users.”
The company says it’s making the change now because it feels comfortable with recent strides its made on using the data, even after it’s been anonymized, to prevent fraud and other security issues. In the blog announcing the change, Google says:
“The problem is difficult to solve because the characteristics of the data that make it useful to prevent fraud, for example, are the very characteristics that also introduce some privacy risk. 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.”
That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of user privacy concerns. But at least Google is being forced to consider that privacy is at least as important as its push for “innovation.” It’s a small step in the right direction.
