Google slashes time for retaining documents

Google, this week, announced a new policy on retention of data, promising to anonymize IP addresses on its server Relevant Products/Services logs after nine months. This will  slash the data-retention period in half. The move comes amid growing criticism from privacy advocates.

"After months of work, our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data's utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner," a Google privacy team wrote on the corporate blog. "We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work."

Nonetheless, Google made it clear it is still concerned about the potential loss of security, quality and innovation that may result from having less data.

Ari Schwartz, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, called Google's move toward a nine-month retention policy a positive step.

For more: on this Google policy:
- see this CIO-today article