Google tightens privacy measures to provide usesrs more anonymity

Google on Wednesday announced that it will start regularly purging its data banks of information that detects its millions of search engine users around the world in order to provide them more assurance of privacy.

For the purpose, the Mountain View, California-based company is adopting new privacy measures that would make it harder to connect online search requests with the people making them, apparently making an attempt to smooth a thorny issue that provoked a showdown with the U.S. government last year.

In order to better shield their anonymity, Google will erase an individual's digital fingerprints from its colossal databases. Besides eliminating the vast amount of information from "cookies," bits of software put on computers to track website visits, it will also delete portions of the IP addresses-the string of numbers that identifies which computer a person is using to get online.

"We're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy," Google lawyers Peter Fleischer and Nicole Wong said in a posting on the company's website.

"Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymise our server logs after a limited period of time."

Until now the online search giant was to keep all logged web searching details indefinitely.

Google asserts it can provide more assurances of anonymity by erasing key pieces of identifying information from its system every one and half to two years. It has started developing a process to make anonymous all search logs that are between 18 months and 24 months old.

"After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the United States, we're pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy," Mr Fleischer and Ms Wong said. "Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details."

Google hoped to implement the new privacy policy within a year.

Google’s policy shift comes in the wake of a high-profile legal battle Google fought last year over the control of the user information that it had been stockpiling. It became embroiled with US government officials that demanded revealing user data from the search engine, and from an America On Line (AOL) flub that published the searches of about 658,000 of its users on a public Web site as part of an effort to share data with researchers.

In the above verdict, the court ordered Google to surrender some data on sites of its popular search engine to the US federal government, but only 50,000 were shown, far fewer than the government urged.

Privacy experts in the United States and Europe applauded Google's announcement as a step in the right direction.

“This is an extremely positive development,” said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Centre for Democracy and Technology. “It’s the type of thing we have been advocating for a number of years

However, some said they would like to see a shorter retention period followed by complete erasure of personal information.