“We looked at what other companies in the industry do, and we were not able to find explicit and clear prvacy policies,” said Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel. “Retention of logs data is critical to our ability to operate and improve our services and to provide adequate security for our users,” he continued.

The new policy came only days after a poor rating from Privacy International was released with Google being the lowest rated of all major Internet properties. “We were disappointed with the report because it is full of numerous inaccuracies,” said Fleischer.

Hopefully with the discussions to take place in July and the new refinements to Google’s data retention, the Internet giant will make its way back to the head of the class.