"may include" in a privacy police is newspeak for "we will".
That 'may' is there so that if you read it you get a warm fuzzy feeling because no way would google ever do such a thing, and it allows them to point at it when they're caught doing it saying 'we told you we were doing this all along, see, we gave ourselves just enough leeway there to squeeze through'. Call me jaded, cynical, old for all I care but I have yet to see a big company that did not act in the way I just described when it came to covering their asses while pulling the wool over the eyes of their end users.
> We anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months)
That's not exactly anonymization is it? You're making it worse. Anonymization is removing all user identifiable information. This is merely stripping some unspecified number of bits of the IP, which more than likely has changed by then so has lost most of its value, and retains the cookie which has more resolution than an IP to begin with.
That 'may' is there so that if you read it you get a warm fuzzy feeling because no way would google ever do such a thing, and it allows them to point at it when they're caught doing it saying 'we told you we were doing this all along, see, we gave ourselves just enough leeway there to squeeze through'. Call me jaded, cynical, old for all I care but I have yet to see a big company that did not act in the way I just described when it came to covering their asses while pulling the wool over the eyes of their end users.
> We anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months)
That's not exactly anonymization is it? You're making it worse. Anonymization is removing all user identifiable information. This is merely stripping some unspecified number of bits of the IP, which more than likely has changed by then so has lost most of its value, and retains the cookie which has more resolution than an IP to begin with.
> and cookie information (after 18 months).
What's the normal lifespan of a google cookie?
More or less than on average 18 months.