Retention, Privacy and Disclosure

Interesting post by Google on how they arrived at their data retention policy.

Worth reading if you use Google, if only to see what data they retain about you, how long they retain it and when they “anonymize” it.

They define “anonymize” as “can no longer be identified with individual users”. Does this mean the data just becomes a bunch of data, like just a bunch of searches, or do they assign some sort of ID so they can still group searches per user, but there is no information linking an ID to a user account?

This brings up the Yahoo fiasco last year when then released “anonyimized” search logs but it turned out to be relatively easy to track down the users.

This is a very sticky issue, but I think that transparence in policy and implementation is key, and Google seems to be taking a positive step in that direction.