New Google Search Cookie Policy Changes Nothing

In an attempt to appease privacy advocates critical of the search giant's data retention policies, Google announced a near meaningless change to its cookie policy yesterday. Starting later this year Google's search cookies will expire after two years rather than the current policy which stores cookies until 2038.

Of course, given that Google sets a new cookie each time you search, the new expiration date only rolls around if you haven't been to the site for two years. Since most of us use Google somewhat more frequently than once every two years the move, while welcome, really doesn't change anything regarding the information Google is tracking.

The announcement posted to the Official Google Blog yesterday claims the company is seeking a balance between privacy concerns and customer ease-of-use.

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.

However, in practice, for heavy Google users the change means almost nothing since the cookies will auto-renew each time you search.

Of course if you're really concerned about the cookies Google uses to track your search queries you can always set your browser to reject all cookies from the Google homepage, just head to your browser's preferences panel and look for the privacy/cookie policy settings.

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