You Have Zero Privacy Anyway -- Get Over It
Linked by David Adams on Fri 11th Dec 2009 01:25 UTC
Privacy, Security, Encryption I was reminded of Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy's infamous sound byte (used as the title of this article) when I read about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's foot-in-mouth moment during a recent CNBC interview (YouTube Link). Here's what Schmidt said: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
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Google's Log Retention
by cristoper on Fri 11th Dec 2009 04:53 UTC
cristoper
Member since:
2009-02-15

This video states that Google deletes the last byte of logged IP addresses after 18 months:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY

I can't find any mention of it in any text Privacy Policy though...

Edit: Here's a more recent (Sep. 2008) post from the Google Blog announcing that the retention time has been cut in half to 9 months.

Edited 2009-12-11 05:05 UTC

Reply Score: 1

RE: Google's Log Retention
by elsewhere on Fri 11th Dec 2009 05:27 in reply to "Google's Log Retention"
elsewhere Member since:
2005-07-13

Edit: Here's a more recent (Sep. 2008) post from the Google Blog announcing that the retention time has been cut in half to 9 months.


AOL went to greater lengths to anonymize their search data in the debacle a while back where they decided to dump it to the public. Didn't take long for the search data to be pieced together and wind up with some innocuous citizen appearing on the evening news.

The announcements you're referring to were PR spin to placate the public, and the EU, who were asking questions that were making Google nervous. IP addresses are only one piece of the puzzle, with enough additional data, they're not even necessary to identify users, as the whole AOL thing proved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal

Reply Parent Score: 5

jabbotts Member since:
2007-09-06

I thought it was last year that researchers managed to take some blobs of anonymized data from Google and reconstruct it providing identifiable user and machine details.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE: Google's Log Retention
by AdamW on Fri 11th Dec 2009 16:30 in reply to "Google's Log Retention"
AdamW Member since:
2005-07-06

Google's 'anonymization' is pretty much meaningless. See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/17/yahoo_anonymization_explain...

Reply Parent Score: 2