One of the side effects of working for a large, successful, multinational corporation is that you tend to lose your sense of perspective. For example, take this post from the Official Google blog entitled Cookies: expiring sooner to improve privacy which states
We are committed to an ongoing process to improve our privacy practices, and have recently taken a closer look at the question of cookie privacy. How long should a web site "remember" cookie information in its logs after a user's visit? And when should a cookie expire on your computer? Cookie privacy is both a server and a client issue.
On the server side, we recently announced that we will anonymize our search server logs — including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers — after 18 months.
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In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers.
What’s is interesting in this post is that Google has sidestepped the actual privacy issue that has many people concerned about the amount of knowledge the company has about Internet users. Numerous bloggers such as Nelson Minar, Shelley Powers and John Dowdell have already pointed how this change doesn't actually change the status quo. In today’s world, Google knows more about most Internet users than their spouse. Thanks to the magic of HTTP cookies Google knows remembers...
You pretty much can't use the Web without running into a Google cookie. So it seems somewhat facetious for Google to claim that if you can avoid using the Internet for two years then they'll forget everything they are storing about you. Oops, actually they don't even claim that. They simply claim that they’ll stop associating your old data with your current usage, if you manage to avoid hitting a Google cookie for two years.
If Google really wanted to address people's privacy concerns they’d blog about how they plan to use and protect all the data they are collecting about Internet users from all of their services instead of making ineffective token gestures that are specific to one service.
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