consumerist.com — has been taking a lot of heat in the past few days over its privacy policies. Today the search giant decreased the amount of time that it ties users search records to their IP to 18 months in response to a letter from the Working Party, a group of national officials that advises the European Union on privacy policy. From the Official Google Blog
Jun 12, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJun 12, 2007
They 'fended off the govt' when it was clear that the feds were just going on a fishing trip to see what they could find, rather than issuing specific requests for data on individual users (a bit like how the telcos rolled over for the feds a little while ago).However, once a fortnight-month I leave my modem off overnight so I get assigned a different IP address, just to be sure :)I don't want any bugger spying on me, even though I haven't done anything wrong. I just don't want to be spied on period!
thatsunpossibleJun 12, 2007
Ignore the government aspect of this for a second... Google wants to retain the records for a period of time for several reasons: security chief among them. The information is to valuable to be immediately discarded. I think 18 months is reasonable.
zxcv12Jun 13, 2007
A couple friends wrote something like that a while ago. It was difficult to tell if it was really doing anything. Most of the ads you get on google are triggered by only your most recent search (unlike Amazon). While google certainly has the data to start sending more ads based on your overall browsing and searching habits, they don't seem to be doing much of that at this point.
cysseroJun 13, 2007
andyrobo60, good idea in theory, but Google are pretty smart. That's why you get those pages now and again that claim you may be a robot and have you type in a CAPTCHA. Google would probably just analyse the program and block it anyway, they have some clever algorithms.Personally, I think they should anonymize records a lot sooner. I don't care if they keep the records for all eternity, I don't see why they need our IP addresses for a year and a half.
rouslanJun 13, 2007
How about deleting records rather than just purging the IPs?
smackheroJun 13, 2007
i hope this doesn't affect personalized searches. the whole point of Google Web History is to track your search patterns and the sites you visit to personalize your searches and return better results. as long as they aren't selling the information or turn it over to the government i don't really care. i think privacy groups should be protesting ISPs that turn over user information to the government rather than harassing Google, who has a pretty good record in terms of protecting their user's privacy.
memobugJun 15, 2007
What, then you'd want your searches to be ineffective?