European Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot welcomed Google’s decision to cut in half the retention period of user logs, calling it “a good step in the right direction.” The search giant recently announced that in order to protect user privacy, and based on recommendations of European authorities, they will keep logs for 9, instead of 18 months.

That is still 3 months longer than the European Commission demanded, however, it’s one big step ahead. And Barrot did not forget to mention that in his statement, in addition to praising Google for their policy to inform users about privacy policies “in a transparent, easily understood manner.”

This is not the first move of this kind from Google, who in March 2007 reduced the data retention period to 18 months from what used to be an unspecified period. In a letter made public by Google, the company explained that at first, they considered the data anonymization to “sacrifice future innovations.”

However, as technology began to evolve, they managed to reduce the retention period, and at the same time, keep the utility of the data while respecting user privacy. “It’s difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security,” the search giant wrote.

 Google is expected to comply with the European Commission’s demands and anonymize user logs after six months, and this also seems to be among their objectives. In addition to that, the company also agreed to include a privacy policy link on their homepage, despite initial objections that the privacy policy was easily accessible to users even without a direct link.