In a move that will be cautiously welcomed by civil liberties campaigners, Microsoft have indicated that they are willing to scale back their policy on data retention in line with European guidelines which stipulate that search data should not be kept longer than six months. However, they have a condition; they want Google to do the same before they will commit.
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In about two months time the European Commission is scheduled to hold a hearing with several US search engines with regard to data retention. However, some within the commission are already annoyed with several search engine providers, most notably, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. The main source of friction being these providers’ refusal to comply with the EC’s demands that they delete all data collected from users after six months.
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