Google shortens data retention period to 9 months

This week Google said it would cut its data retention period from 18 to 9 months. The new policy is in response to concerns by EU privacy regulators, according to a company blog post dated September 8.

"While we're glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we're also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows," Google said.