Google agrees to halve its data anonymizaton deadline from 18 to 9 months, complaining that this does more harm than good. Google's Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer and others argue that Google needs the extra time with our data because it helps them weed out fraud, while closing the time gap has only a minimal benefit to privacy concerns. The privacy and anticompetitive issues are swirling into a perfect storm Google will have to weather to avoid Microsoft's fate at the hands of the DOJ.

"We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users," wrote Google's Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel; Jane Horvath, senior privacy counsel; and software engineer Alma Whitten in a blog post.