Google Cookies To Auto-Delete In Two Years

Google has announced that its cookies, the tiny files its leaves on a visiting computer, will auto-delete after two years.   This is an attempt to satisfythose who want Google to improve its privacy and data retention policy. However, there’s a catch. If you re-visit a Google site within that two years, the clock will re-set to zero, and the twoyears will begin over. Considering that Google is the search engine of choice for many people, that essentially means your cookies will never expire. All search engines, and, in fact, most web sites,install cookies on the computers of visitors. Currently, Google’s cookies are set to delete in 2039, rather than in two years.   “After listening to feedback from our users and fromprivacy advocates, we’ve concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies,” said Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer.Google has to “find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time.”   You can manually delete cookies on yourcomputer, and you have the option to control which cookies from which sites are stored on your machine.   Google recently announced it will anonymize data from users’ web searches after18-24 months.