Google backpedals on IP 'anonymization' claim
Found on The Register on Monday, 26 April 2010
Google has always claimed that under the new policy, it "anonymizes" IPs - even though it doesn't.
And as Soghoian has pointed out, if a cookie stays intact for 18 months, then restoring those missing eight bits is trivial. Though Google erases the bits on your nine-month-old search queries, they remain intact on your newer queries - and both sets of queries carry the same cookie info.
It would be so simple to just delete that old data after a few months, but that data octopus just wants to keep each and every bit.