It has been decided that Google will reduce the period of keeping personal information in its datalogs to 9 months. Google confirmed the fact on its official blog.

“When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas. We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.”

It has been confirmed that now Google will anonymize IP addresses as far as their servers are concerned, after 9 months. An interesting tug of war was going between Google as well as the EU Commission on this articular issue.

Google is of the view that the IP addresses do not count for personal identifiable information. Google says that these IP addresses are shifted around by Internet service providers. So these addresses can not be used to identify individuals. But EU completely disagrees on their point !

Peter Fleischer of Google says that:

“We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.”
Google announced that :

“Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: We'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.”

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