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Google Will Anonymize IP Logs Faster
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on some changes to the data retention policy at Google in response to pressure from European authorities, but also included in the article is information about why Google claims they need to retain non-anonymised data for so long. Improving services, sure, but preventing fraud? Aiding 'valid legal orders'?"
Reader s0ckratees points to some commentary on the change at Google's official blog. The upshot: IP addresses in Google's logs will be anonymized after nine months, rather than 18 as previously.
Scrape the log
To sparkling shine
So the chin
Hairless, divine
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And the government wants to know who's been searching for things they don't approve of they have to ask google for the logs every 9 months rather than every 18 months.
Improving services, sure, but preventing fraud?
Sure - AdWord fraud. Scrubbing logs quicker means less leeway for click fraud to be discovered.
Actually, the IP should not be stored at all. Google might want to analyze the IPs to analyze and prevent attacks on its servers and additionally to get location information for its ad services. But there is no need to store it for a longer period -- unless you want to start massive data mining projects, which is exactly what is feared most from a privacy point of view.
So, any good news would be that the IP is not stored at all (except very temporarily).
considering the amount of data Google processes on a regular basis, a 9 Month backlog isn't that unreasonable.
i'm more concerned about Google not handing my data over to 3rd parties or governments than their retaining records of my searches. as long as they're willing to stand up for the rights of users, they can hold my search data for as long as they need to improve search results, reduce spam, and develop personalized search features.
What difference does it make to reduce this 18 months to 9 months log retention period?
Will Google anonymize logs in other countries too?
How about Google China? It respectfully hands over logs to the authorities on demand anytime. Same with Google India.
slashdot rocks
Salting goes without saying -1 uninsightful
I'm talking about the fact that it's 2008, and that search space could be exhaustively searched in a matter of hours on a desktop machine.
As the poster below me points out, "throw away the salt" is an answer, but it means the logs can only be compared to other logs in the time frame that you were using that salt.
Maybe IPv6 will make anonymized logs more feasible because of the 2^128 search space.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I'm hypertensive, you insensitive clod.
So I generate a table with 2^32 IP addresses and their MD5 with themselves as the salt, it doesn't enlarge the search space in this situation and I can then easily do a binary search to find what the origional IP was.
Their privacy policy specifically says that they DO keep logs of your IP and search queries.
Jeremy http://alucinari.net
Tor isn't great for high bandwidth connections, but I think it's just perfect to make sure all of those do-gooder large corporations don't get a choice about anonymizing IP addresses.
http://www.torproject.org/
Absolute statements are never true
considering the amount of data Google processes on a regular basis, a 9 Month backlog isn't that unreasonable.
Sure it is. Why? Because they are collecting data continuously and if it takes a long time to process what they've collected, more data is backlogged, and it keeps spiraling out of control. In fact, if it takes more than 24 hours to process 1 day of data, the backlog will increase without limit. The proper thing to do is to apply proper anonymization to the information immediately so you don't have to worry about it. There are plenty of methods that allow you to anonymize important information while retaining enough data for analysis. Here's one paper [Warning: PDF] on the subject.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
first off, Google's processing capacity isn't static, it's constantly growing. just because it takes more than 24 hrs to process a certain set of data doesn't mean that the backlog will increase without limit. that isn't a logically sound argument.
if you take that argument and reduce the time frame from 1 day to 1 hour->1 minute->1 millisecond... so on and so forth, you reach the conclusion that if Google is unable to instantaneously process/analyze every piece of data the exact moment it is received or created, then their backlog will increase without limit.
sometimes data needs to accumulated before it can be processed. for instance, to observe search trends, or to compare e-mails for spam analysis, etc. sometimes logs need to be kept for extended periods of time--that's why they're called logs--or data is retained for repeat analysis.
i don't know what exactly Google retains user data for or what kind of analysis they do, but it's understandable if some data needs to be retained in its original state for certain types of research or analysis. if they were going to release network measurement data to 3rd parties, as that paper you linked to discusses, then, yes, i would expect Google to follow their own anonymization guidelines. but like they've stated in their press release, it's all about finding a balance between protecting user privacy and improving the quality of their services.
perhaps the best thing to do is to give users the option to have their search requests retained for improving personalized search results, and let them enable/disable this feature as it suits them. all other data will simply be processed for a set period of time and then expunged.
if they're not releasing server logs to anyone, anonymization isn't really necessary. though i'm sure they allow users to access their services through anonymous proxies.