Google Commits to Change of Search Data Policy.

Google — one of the prime examples of a company collecting untold terrabytes of data on users like you and me — announced that they will implement a change in their policy of how long they will keep certain data and after what point will it no longer be traceable back to unique users.

It’s a positive step for an industry leader to finally define for how long data will be held.

“When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we’re pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we’re legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.”

Read more on the Google Blog

It will be interesting to see how Google will “make this data much more anonymous.” When AOL innocently released six months of search data last year to researchers, they removed IP addresses but failed to think about the personal info that might be in the keyword search itself. Such data was used by sleuths to trace unique search records back to original people to prove how careless this was of AOL.