Google: Keep user data safe by letting us hoard it forever

Joe Fay
The Register
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Google has sought to turn its China crisis to its advantage by arguing it demonstrates why it should be allowed to hang onto search logs indefinitely.

Privacy supremo Peter Fleischer told ComputerWorld in an interview that, “The unprecedented hacking… and the threat of similar such attacks in the future emphasized the importance of internal analysis of logs.”

Google has been under particular pressure in Europe to stick a time limit on how long it hangs onto information that can be used to identity searchers.

In 2008 it halved the time it hung onto such info to nine months, a cut that still did not find favour with Eurocrats. It continues to hold data beyond that date, but says it does not hold the full IP address of users, effectively anonymizing the data, but still making it useful to the world’s largest ad broker.

Full article here

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