Latest Google privacy enhancements ‘useless’
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- We weren’t overly impressed with the news Google is generously reducing the amount of time it keeps logs from people who’ve used the site in searches to nine months.
Is ‘nine’ some kind of magical number? Does this very specific period of time mean ‘Do No Evil’ Google is somehow prevented from doing anything evil with user data?
Not even nearly.
“Google used to keep it logs intact “indefinitely,” then in March last year, it said it’d only keep them for 24 months and that it would ultimately reduce data retention to a-year-and-a-half,”said p2pnet, going on:
“Now, on its official blog and in a policy paper addressed to European Union privacy regulators, ‘It was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation,’ it says. [For 'innovation' read 'for advertising purposes'.]”
“Google’s announcement was extremely light on details, specifically, how the company planned to anonymize the records after 9 months,” he says, going on, “I contacted Google to find out more, and received an extremely interesting reply »»»
After nine months, we will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs; after 18 months we remove the last eight bits in the IP address and change the cookie information. We’re still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy…. It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization, but we believe these changes will make it very unlikely users could be identified…. We hope to be able to add the 9-month anonymization process to our existing 18-month process by early 2009, or even earlier.
goes on to explain in detail “what this means (and how useless the new privacy ‘enhancements’ are),” concluding:
Even though the 9-month-old search logs have been “anonymized”, because the cookie values remain, it is trivial to match the newer search results to the older searches, and thus completely reverse the anonymization process.
The simple truth is that any IP anonymization technique, no matter how strong or weak, is simply a waste of time, if cookie values are not also anonymized.
Unfortunately, Google is relying on the fact that the mainstream media (I’m looking at you New York Times / Washington Post) are clueless on these issues, as well as seemingly most of the technology press.
Google’s new anonymization policy is totally worthless, and the company deserves to be called out for its deception.
Dead on,
And as we in our post, “it’s worth remembering last year Google was the only firm to completely fail an important six-month investigation into privacy practices employed by key Net-based companies.”
generously reducing – New Google data retention plan, September 9, 2008
CNET News – Debunking Google’s log anonymization propaganda, September 11, 2008
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