Portable Planet

Not wanting any repeats of the AOL search logsfiasco of ‘06, Google has announced that they’re going to be more proactive about privacy.

Namely, after 18 to 24 months the company will now render their log data more anonymous so that searches cannot be attached to an individual user. Now we can go back to egosurfing with slightly less self consciousness!

“When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details,”explained Google on the company’s .”Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we’re pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we’re legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses)but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.”