MOUNTAIN VIEW,
California (Reuters) - Google Inc has halved the amount of time it
stores personal data gathered from its users' Web surfing habits, a
move aimed at improving its privacy policies, a company official said.
Google used to store such data for 18 months, but has now trimmed that duration to nine months.
Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, told a meeting of
computer industry privacy experts at Microsoft Corp's Silicon Valley
offices that her company planned to "anonymize" the computer addresses
of its users more quickly.
"We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention
policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to
improve privacy for our users," Google officials said in a blog post
released Monday night.
Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist for Microsoft Corp, said
Google's move was done in response to pressure from European regulators
and by industry rivals.
Cullen, who was taking part in panel discussion with Wong, said that
until a year-and-a-half ago, Google had kept personally identifiable
information about its Web users on company computers for an indefinite
amount of time.
Google adopted an 18-month privacy policy only after pressure from the European Union, he said.
(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Derek Caney)
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