Google cuts cookie time for privacy
“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,”Google said in its official blog.
“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.”
When Google originally designed the PREF cookie, they set the expiration far into the future — in 2038, to be exact — ‘because the primary purpose of the cookie was to preserve preferences, not to let them be forgotten’.
“We were mindful of the fact that users can always go to their browsers to change their cookie management settings, e.g. to delete all cookies, delete specific cookies, or accept certain types of cookies (like first-party cookies) but reject others (like third-party cookies).”
“After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy,” Google pointed out.
In the coming months, Google will start issuing their 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.”
Google said that these steps — logs anonymization and cookie lifetime reduction — are part of their ongoing plan to continue innovating in the area of privacy to protect their users.
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