December 21, 2008 by Admin
Yahoo said yesterday that it will restrict the time it holds personal search information that identifies the user. The move comes amongst increased anger from politicians and civil liberties groups about the practice of retaining personal search data.
The new policy is to delete all personal information i.e., phone numbers, names, as well as most of the IP address and all cookie data, after 90 days, reducing their previous retention period by more than 10 months . In doing so, Yahoo have imposed upon themselves the most restrictive data retention policy of any of the search engines. At present, Google does a similar thing after nine months, whilst Microsoft keeps the information for 18 months.
The US government and privacy campaigners have applauded the move, though it may not have been purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. Some industry analysts think that they have simply seen the way the wind is blowing and decided to move first, scoring a hefty PR victory in the process. Yahoo has gambled that their two major competitors, Google and Microsoft, will be forced to follow suit eventually.
They are probably right. The other big two will more than likely have to moderate their policies, bringing them roughly in line with Yahoo’s. If not by choice then by law, many privacy and civil liberties advocates are pushing hard for legislation to be put in place that would force them.
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