Ars Technica has an interview with Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong and security/privacy engineer Alma Whitten about privacy issues related to the company’s products and services. “While the “good guy/bad guy” and “don’t be evil” quotes may seem too cute by half to some, Wong and Whitten made a strong pitch for the truth of both slogans. In their view, Google really is fighting the good fight when it comes to your online privacy,” Ars Technica says.

Google logs an astonishing amount of data, including the search logs from its flagship product. It keeps this data indefinitely, so searching for a combination of yourwife’sname and youraddress and “rat poison in her cereal” is not a particularly smart idea (though search users do this sort of thing anyway).

But the company does “anonymize” this data eventually. The last octet of the IP address is wiped after nine months, which means there are 254 possibilities for the IP address in question (.0 and .255 are reserved addresses). After 18 months, Google anonymizes the unique cookie data stored in these logs.

This isn’t especially ambitious; Europe’s data protection supervisors have called for IP anonymization after six months and competing search engines like Bing do just that (and Bing removes the entire IP address, not just the last octet). Yahoo scrubs its data after 90 days.

But Whitten, who was involved in Google’s decisions on such issues, said that Google has done the best it can to keep the retention period to a minimum while still extracting maximum value from that data… and that this “value” isn’t just to Google but also to users. [...]

Instead of cutting the data retention period further, Google is more focused on 1) transparency and 2) keeping the data locked down safely. The company believes that when users know what Google keeps and why it keeps it—and when they have the chance to opt out—users are often happy to let Google do its thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 and is filed under Anonymity, Identification, International, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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