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Want to get personal with Google?

Google has hinted that it may get around some of the privacy restrictions imposed by the EC by allowing user to explicitly request that that their personal information be held longer than the 18 month limits laid down by regulators.
Written by Andrew Donoghue, Contributor

Google has hinted that it may get around some of the privacy restrictions imposed by the EC by allowing user to explicitly request that that their personal information be held longer than the 18 month limits laid down by regulators.

Speaking at an event in Paris, Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer, responded to a question regarding the possibility of whether users would be given the choice about how long their details are held by the search specialist by claiming that the company was considering such a move.

"We have declared that we will keep records for 18 months and we think that is a good compromise - 18 months of history is enough to do a good job and even if we anonymise the logs after 18 months then the information is still useful for spell checking and other applications," she said. "Explicitly allowing users to have their data stored for longer then that is something that we could look at in 18 months."

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