Does Google care about user privacy, or just public image?
In this post on Mashable, Stan Schroeder questions Google’s motives in their jab to Microsoft about privacy. In the official Google Weblog entry, Google states “Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy.”
Google has already been anonymizing their logs after 18 months, so this is more of a change than anything new. They’re simply reducing that time to 9 months.
This is a good thing, as it reduces the amount of time that the government or some organization with a court order can obtain access to your search history or website activity on any of Google’s properties. Don’t think it can happen to you? Just take a look at what happened in the recent Viacom case, where Google was ordered to hand over user data, and Viacom demanded that data include the users’ IP addresses, which could be used to identify them.
Viacom caved to the pressure, however, and users’ IP addresses were not given up (this time). But the threat is real, and it’s only a matter of time before a judge in a lawsuit or a government agency forces a company to give up their logs. The fact that Google will only have 9 months of logs on file is definitely a positive, since the average court can often take that long to make it to trial.
So does Google care about user privacy, or just public image? Google’s mantra is “do no evil” and so as a serious Google user I hope they are sincere. Still, as they continue to grow to monolithic proportions, I’m skeptical at how long before they turn to the dark side.
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