Google to anonymise user data after 9 months

9th September 2008

Google has changed a policy dictating that it anonymises users' IP addresses after 18 months.

The rule has now been changed to nine months in an attempt to allay growing regulatory worries over the search giant's control of identifiable user information.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Peter Fleischer, Jane Horvath and Alma Whitten of Google said that they were "concerned" over the impact of the policy change on its search quality, security and anti-fraud activities.

"As the period prior to anonymisation gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows," they added.

However, according to the Centre for Democracy & Technology's Alissa Cooper, Google technically does not completely anonymise user data as it only removes part of the IP addresses in question.

She told the Washington Post that the search engine should remove all identifiable data, including cookies, from its logs.