Amid growing scrutiny from government regulators in the U.S and Europe, Google is amending its privacy practices and keeping the IP addresses of consumers who do searches on Google for a shorter period of time. The dominant search engine will keep server log data for only nine months now instead of 18 (which itself was a reduction put in place last year from

an indefinite retention period). It will also start anonymizing the data it collects from its Google Suggest feature within 24 hours.  As Google grows bigger and reaches deeper into the online lives of nearly everybody who uses the Web, concerns about whether it is becoming Big Brother will also increase.

Google (and the rest of the Internet industry) is policing itself in the hopes of staving off formal government encroachment into its business practices. The last thing Google wants is for the government to start telling it what its data retention policies should be. But it does so reluctantly. In the blog post explaining the new privacy policy, Google says:     Read more on Techcrunch