Google have just announced a change to their Data Retention Policy for their new browser Chrome. The change is intended to improve the privacy of users.

By default, Google’s Chrome saves around 2% of all the data typed in the search/URL omnibox (note that this happens dynamically, even before you press enter) and the data is retained indefinitely, allegedly in order to "monitor and improve the service".

While unsurprisingly this is not about to change, Google have announced today that they are giving in to pressures by U.S. and European privacy advocates and are cutting the time for anonymization of the IP addresses and tracking cookie information stored down from 18 months to nine months.

Even though the move does not do much in the way of actually reducing the amount of private data collected by Google, they have expressed some reluctance over this measure, as quoted from their blog post “Another step to protect user privacy”:

"While we're glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we're also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data."

Jacques Barrot, the EU's justice and home affairs commissioner, named Google’s move "a good step in the right direction," although he did recommend that the anonymization time be further reduced to six months.