For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on Google's announcement that it will "anonymize" some search-related user data by stripping IP addresses from records after 18 to 24 months. The search company previously kept log data for as long as the data was deemed useful. The new policy will make it more difficult to connect search activity with individual users after that period ends. For today's story, I spoke with Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe for Google. He co-wrote the announcement posted yesterday on the official Google Blog. I also spoke with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who says that while the announcement is good news, Google and other search companies can and should do more to ensure that user privacy rights are protected worldwide. Here's the EFF's statement.
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LISTEN:
Link to archived audio (Real/Win) and transcript. Or, listen to this report as an MP3 in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). And here's a direct MP3 link for today's story.
Archive of previous NPR "Xeni Tech" features, with narrated image slideshows and transcripts, here. (Special thanks to NPR News producer Nihar Patel!)
Today's report references an earlier "NPR: Xeni Tech" report from January, 2006: Bush Administration Seeks Google Search Records.
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See also Ryan Singel's coverage of the Google announcement at Wired News, and Ryan has another interesting related post today — Google searches will be used in a murder case:
New Jersey authorities are prosecuting the wife of a murdered man for allegedly killing him with the heldp of prescription drugs prescribed by her then-lover and are using internet logs of searches from her own computer to prove she was the murderer, according to a story in New Jersey's Daily Record.
While the prosecution did not seem to subpoena search engines, the story was published on the same day Google announced it was changing its data retention policy in order to protect users's privacy.
Link.
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Previously on BoingBoing:
Reader comment: James says,
I noticed today that I didn't get a domain cookie from google after
signing out of gmail today: Link.
The FAQ google linked too doesn't say much about how they're changing
the cookie. Any word on that? Maybe it was a fluke?
Karl Elliott says,
I started using http://www.blackboxsearch.com/ shortly after Google lost its battle with the US Feds last year.
It searches Google, Yahoo, or MSN via a web-proxy; thus anonymizing one's searches.
The site is ad-free and stable.
