Google to Shorten Shelf Life of Stale Cookies

On Monday morning, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, made a post on Google’s official blog. The topic at hand concerned cookies and Google’s new stance on the issue. Though it’s hardly drastic in nature, it is a slight wink in the direction of all the search giant’s privacy critics.

The post starts by recounting Google’s recent decision to anonymize its server logs after 18 months. Then Fleischer asks "the question about cookie lifetime: when should a cookie expire on your computer?"

He then notes that Google’s PREF cookie allows the search engine to remember users’ preferences from their last visit to the site, and was originally designed to expire in 2038, "because the primary purpose of the cookie was to preserve preferences, not to let them be forgotten."

However, in response to feedback from its users and privacy advocates, Google will now shorten the life span of its cookies. Within the next few months the search engine will set their cookies to auto-expire after two months of non-use, which means that if a user visits Google today, their cookies will expire after two years if he/she does not return to the site within that time frame.

On the other hand, for active users these cookies will auto-renew every time they use Google.

Fleischer makes it a point to note that users always have the option of controlling and filtering their cookies through their Web browser preference settings.

""It remains with you to tame the cookie monster, if that’s what you care to do. Your web browser provides you the ability to control them, which gives you the responsibility to do so," says Jim Harper, Internet privacy authority.

This move will do little to nothing to appease those that are fearful of Google’s massive amounts of data and information that it gleans from its many users, but at the very least it gives off the impression that Google actually cares about what its users and privacy pundits are suggesting, and that will be enough to please the millions upon millions of Web users that adore the company.

Sources:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/cookies-expiring-
sooner-to-improve.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070716/tc_afp/technolog
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