Google's Anonymised Search Logs Criticised for Being 'All But Useless'

Google's European search logs are being heavily filtered before being shared with rival search engines and AI chatbots, as per the Digital Markets Act. The anonymisation method was designed by Damien Desfontaines, a privacy engineer who worked with the European Commission on the specification.

The filtering process removes information that could be used to identify individual users, including searches containing rare words or very long text, and blurs locations until every record blends in with at least 1,000 people. The dataset is also heavily reduced, with Google's initial offer removing between 90-100% of unique search queries.

Desfontaines criticised Google's anonymisation strategy, stating that 'their design choices rendered the data all but useless for optimizing a search engine.' He added that given Google's internal expertise, 'it's pretty clear that they could have done much better if they wanted to.'