Google Avoids Privacy Storm With the E.U.

Google took a preemptive move to quell privacy fears in Europe yesterday, though the effort may do little to prevent future regulation of search data collection.

Last night the search giant announced that they would shorten the length of time that consumer data collected from searches is retained -- from 18 to nine months.

This comes after EU data protection officers questioned the necessity of search engines to keep records of their users' behavior at all.

The search giant once kept information connected to individual IP addresses indefinitely, but shortened that time to 18-months in 2007, in previous efforts to appease privacy concerns. Microsoft and Yahoo subsequently shortened the amount of time they retained such data to 18 and 13 months respectively.

Google has since worked out ways to achieve similar results by only retaining user information for nine  months, but argues that there are trade offs to completely forfeiting this data, including loss of advertising efficacy and fraud protection.

On their blog announcement, Google wrote:

"As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows. So, it's difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other."

In addition, Google will change their "Suggest" application, which automatically recommends search terms based on what searches have previously typed. Google logs 2 percent of data collected on such searches, but starting this month, such records now will all be erased after a 24-hour period.

But as long as regulators continue to question the need for search portals to retain any of this information, Google's efforts to protect its search data may be proven futile. Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, told the Washington Post today: "My main concern is the ability to collect users' Web addresses, and therefore your complete surfing on the Web could be tracked."

by Meghan Keane for Wired.com

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