• by Shankar Gupta , March 16, 2007

Google's announcement that it will begin eliminating the connection between search queries and specific IP addresses after 18-24 months is a "good first step," say privacy watchdogs, but more needs to be done to protect users' privacy.

"If the data's there, there's all sorts of ways it can get out, whether by accident or perhaps through some sort of subpoena," said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokesperson for the Electronic Freedom Frontier. "They can always go a little farther."

Google's new policy--which will be implemented within a year, according to a post on the company's blog by Peter Fleischer, Google's European privacy counsel and Nicole Wong, the company's deputy general counsel--is to delete the last 8 bits of the IP address of the searcher, meaning that searches that were previously identifiable down to a specific computer will only be identifiable down to a block of 256 computers.

Previously, Google maintained that data indefinitely.

"Eighteen to 24 months is a long time, but it's shorter than forever, which is what they've been doing before," said Jeschke. "This data is very revealing--it's a very intimate picture of someone; it's what they search for, what they're interested in, what they worry about, what they love--it's something I think most people agree they wouldn't want the world seeing."

Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, said that the move was partly a defensive one, to discourage the government or individuals from subpoenaing or obtaining a court order to force the company to disclose search data.

"In a sense, this is a defense move on the part of Google to make it so that the data they would provide to the government would be less helpful, so they'll be less likely to ask for it," In 2006, Google entered a legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice to avoid disclosing search queries as part of an online pornography investigation. In March 2006, a federal judge ruled that Google had to disclose 50,000 random URLs from its database, but did not compel the company to disclose users' search data.

Despite Google's victory in court, however, there remains the possibility that the data could be disclosed accidentally, said Jeschke, citing AOL's release of search queries in August 2006. In that incident, 650,000 users' search queries for the months of March and May were made available on a public site.

The users were identified by a number, but inquiring observers were able to connect specific strings of search queries to individual users.