Google tightens up search privacy
Published: 15 Mar 2007 08:55 GMT
…from privacy advocates and Congress and the filing of a complaint against AOL with the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the firing of two AOL employees and the resignation of its chief technology officer and a class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit was later dismissed because AOL's user agreement requires lawsuits filed against it to be filed in its home state of Virginia, said Bankston.
Google said it can't anonymise the entire IP address, delete it altogether or anonymise any of it sooner than 18 months because it needs the data to analyse usage patterns and diagnose system problems. For example, Google uses the information for fraud detection and prevention and to combat denial of service attacks that can temporarily cripple or shut down servers. "Knowing what country a user is coming from helps us figure out whether or not we are delivering the right search," said Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel for Google.
Why wait 18 to 24 months?
The proposed timeframe for retaining the data in identifiable form was chosen because data-retention laws in Europe require communications service providers to hold on to the information for that long, according to Wong.
If governments in various countries enact legislation to require communications service providers to archive internet traffic for specific lengths of time including up to four years, as some are considering, Google would then have to abide by the laws, the company said. Law enforcement will still be able to subpoena server log data after it is anonymised, but every request will be considered on its merits and Google's response will depend on how narrow the request is and how relevant the data is to the investigation, Google said.
However, EPIC's Rotenberg said two years is the "top end" of the timeframe European governments are seeking for requiring that communications service providers retain user data.
Google said it is making the changes in response to feedback from privacy activists and others, including the Norwegian Data Protection Authority with whom Google executives met in January. A team of Google executives, engineers and lawyers were involved in establishing the new policy, Wong said.
Of all the major search engines, Google is the only one to publicly disclose that it has fought government efforts for consumer data. A year ago, Google challenged a subpoena received by the US Department of Justice that ordered Google to hand over a random sample of a week's worth of search terms and one million web pages from its index, to aid in the Bush administration's defence of an internet pornography law. One month later a federal judge sided mostly with Google and ordered the company to provide half of the amount of web pages sought, but none of the search queries.
The new policy would not have affected that situation because the government was not asking for searches tied to individual IP addresses, Wong said.
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