A new announcement has indicated that Google would cut down logs retention from current 18 months to 9 months. News BRUSSELS, Belgium - The EU's top justice official on Thursday welcomed a recent move by Google Inc. to cut the time it keeps users' search details. ADVERTISEMENT Jacques Barrot, the EU's justice and home affairs commissioner said Google's announcement earlier this week was "a good step in the right direction." He said however, Google's move to cut its retention of data logs from 18 months to nine should be trimmed further to six months. Barrot said "awareness and compliance with fundamental human rights are of pivotal importance" for Internet service providers such as Google. Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy adviser, said the company would work closely with EU data and privacy supervisors "to set the standard on respecting privacy." Google announced Tuesday that it would apply the new privacy changes to its sites worldwide. EU data-protection officials have questioned the need for search engines to keep data on users' searches. How often have you felt that you are being profiled by Google (without your knowledge) and afraid about your privacy? Do you think the retention should be even less - 3 to 6 months?
No I think it should stay, most of the successful internet entrepeuners I know would not be on $100k plus if it was not for nearly 2 years of search patterns to work on. How do you think you get all your data to analyse when you are choosing keywords on searches, how else do you pull in what searches you get from what regions? Google has been pressured into a move that has no real effect on anyone other than reducing the amount of data advertisers have available. The only reason this got anywhere was because of conspiracy theorists who were concerned about sweet f all.
Always good for users of Google knowing their personal data is to be kept for a shorted amount of time. Although I wouldn't be surprised if Google change the EULA at a later date.
Sounds like a rather pointless move by the EU. What difference does it make if they keep your data for 3 months, 6 months, 2 years, 50 years? Either way they have it and can do as they please with it. What's to stop Google from just backing up the data everytime they purge anything? They could keep a huge database for their own uses, yet only show the public the last 3 - 6 months. Nobody would be able to tell.
I don't see what's the issue with privacy concern. It's not a data based on individual search preferences. It's a collective data of every person using the search engine and the data is really helpful for webmasters like us. The longer the retention period, the better it is, or that's what I feel.
yes there is no privacy in google. you can use google for good things and bad things also. i think some privacy must add to google.