Google Talks About Storing Information

About 2 weeks ago I explained how Google now offers to track your history.  To me, its a little disturbing how much information Google has available to them about each of us.  Some users are even considered dropping Google all together. 

Friday, Google finally addressed concerns about retaining information on their official blog. 

We recently announced a new policy to anonymize our server logs after 18–24 months. We’re the only leading search company to have taken this step publicly. We believe it’s an important part of our commitment to respect user privacy while balancing a number of important factors.

In developing this policy, we spoke with various privacy advocates, regulators and others about how long they think the period should be. There is a wide spectrum of views on this – some think data should be preserved for longer, others think it should be anonymized almost immediately. We spent a great deal of time sorting this out and thought we’d explain some of the things that prompted us to decide on 18-24 months.

Three factors were critical. One was maintaining our ability to continue to improve the quality of our search services. Another was to protect our systems and our users from fraud and abuse. The third was complying—and anticipating compliance—with possible data retention requirements.

They also expand a little bit on the above 3 factors in the article I linked to above.   For those of you that are weary about Google retaining your information, does this make you feel any better about it?  I’m still of the opinion that information is power, and Google has way to much of it.