Over the past few days we saw Google take a pretty blunt beating in regard to its privacy practices. In what I assume is as much a response to that as anything else, The Official Google Blog has been updated with a post outlining the company’s cooperation with European Union’s Working Party (which monitors data protection for the EU):

The Article 29 Working Party, an advisory panel composed of representatives from all of the E.U.’s national data protection authorities, has sent us a letter in response to our commitment to anonymize server logs. In it, they’re asking us to provide further information about our new policy, and to explain why we feel that the time period of 18 to 24 months is “proportionate” under European data protection principles. For some time, we’ve discussed many things with the Working Party, ranging from issues raised by Google products like Gmail and Google Desktop to industry-wide concerns, such as the challenges of protecting privacy in the Web 2.0 era. We’re pleased that this most recent letter from the Working Party acknowledges our ongoing engagement with the data protection community and, in particular, our “readiness to consult with it [the Working Party] in contrast with a relative lack of engagement by some of the other leading players in the search engine community”.

In response, Google has published its reply to that letter in an open format for all to see. In addition, the search company announced that it has update the previous policy of anonymizing search server logs in 18 - 24 to simply 18 months. They won’t go any less than 18 months but they do point out that future regulations may require them to bump that number back up to 24 months.

Google also plans to look for ways to shorten the expiration time placed on cookies the company puts on user’s computers. As they point out, a balance must be reached between cookie expiration times and the need to have customers re-enter basic settings on a frequent basis. We’re to expect a future announcement on the cookie issue “in the coming months”.

Side note: Firefox users can also install the CustomizeGoogle plugin if they want a little more control over their Google experience (including the anonymization of cookies).