Just ask my son — he’s already counting down the days until school’s out in June.

Anyway, Google has announced that it will now anonymize IP addresses in its server logs after 9 months.  You may remember that in Spring 2007 they announced that they would anonymize after 18 months.  Other search engines soon followed suit.

Speaking of suits, Google cites pesky European regulators and the scary implications of the Viacom suit for their decision.  From the post, it’s obvious they were dragged kicking and screaming to this decision:

“When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas.  We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users … While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data.  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.”

Update: Google’s now saying they’ll ananymize the random queries they extract from Google Suggest within 24 hours.  Are we seeing panic or an orderly withdrawal?

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on September 09, 2008 - 9:44 am

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