Commentary

Just An Online Minute... Will Google's Move To 'Anonymize' Data Protect Privacy?

Google will no longer indefinitely store data that could link individual users with their search histories, but instead will make the records anonymous after 18 to 24 months, the company said on its blog yesterday.

While some advocates hailed the move as a step forward, others maintain that there's no reason to keep the data even that long.

"I think it is an absolute disaster for online privacy," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, told The New York Times. Rotenberg fears that Google will set the industry standard, and that 18-24 months will now become the standard length of time that search companies retain such information.

It's not at all clear why Google -- or any search company, for that matter -- needs to retain logs that tie individual users to search queries for such a long period. Yes, companies need some information about how many clicks came from the same address to resolve click fraud disputes -- but such disagreements often center on how many clicks came from the same IP address in minutes or hours, not months or years.

Additionally, Google's proposed methods for making the logs anonymous don't appear likely to protect people's privacy in the event that the search queries themselves fall into the wrong hands.

Google currently collects not only people's searches, but also their IP addresses and cookie information. The company now says it will change some bits of the IP address and cookie data after 18-24 months. But even a fake IP address won't necessarily protect users' privacy if Google still stores that users' search history.

Consider, last summer when AOL mistakenly released search logs for more than 650,000 users, those logs weren't attached to IP addresses. Yet, some searchers were easily identifiable just by the nature of their queries. For instance, The New York Times unmasked Thelma Arnold, or "User No. 4417749" in just days, based on her search history. As long as Google continues to store search logs, it risks a similar debacle.

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