Google changes privacy policy

Google is to dump information it keeps about individuals' searches after nine months, the company has announced.

It has always kept data from searches as it allows the company to provide better results in future searches and make sure information matches an individual's needs.

However, last year it buckled to pressure from privacy advocates and reduced the amount of time it held on to data to 18 months.

Google has now announced that it will cut the period of time again to just nine months, in response to the concerns of the European Union's privacy regulators, who were demanding justification from the company about the legitmacy of keeping the data at all.

"We have had literally hundreds of discussions with data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates around the world to explain our privacy practices and to work together to develop ways to improve privacy," said Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google.

Google's system works by matching searches to an IP (internet protocol) address, so previous searches can play a part in shaping the results when a new search is made.

However, Google admitted that it hadn't figured out precisely how the new system of anonymising the IP address logs after nine months while still customising search results would work.

"We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymising as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work," said Fleischer.

The company recently put a link to its privacy policy on the search engine's homepage.

www.google.co.uk