Yahoo Cuts Data Retention Time to Three Months

[dhilipkumar]

Yahoo Cuts Data Retention Time to Three Months

A week after Microsoft challenged its search engine competitors to anonymize their data after six months, Yahoo on Wednesday announced that it would retain its information for only three months.Yahoo will anonymize user log data within 90 days, and this will also apply to page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks.

Fraud and security related data, however, will be kept for six months, while information pertaining to legal disputes might be kept longer, Yahoo said.
Yahoo previously anonymized its data after 13 months.

"We know that our users expect relevant and compelling content and advertising when they visit Yahoo, but they also want assurances that we are focused on protecting their privacy," Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president of policy and head of privacy, said in a statement.icrosoft last week announced that it would anonymize its data after six months – but only if its rivals followed suit. Its current policy anonymizes that data after 18 months.

Microsoft's plea was primarily directed at Google, which John Vassallo, vice president of EU affairs at Microsoft said "collects and retains much more search data than any other company [and] thereby has the greatest impact on the privacy of Internet search users."Google announced in September that it would anonymize its data after nine months.

"When we make changes to our policies, they are not conditioned on what our competitors will do but what will be best for our users both in terms of the services we provide and respect of their privacy," Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Google, said in response to Microsoft's challenge.Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, applauded Yahoo's decision.

"Privacy is a cornerstone of freedom and I applaud Yahoo's announcement today for recognizing that consumers deserve ample privacy protections in the digital era to ensure trust and freedom on the Internet," Markey said in a statement. "I have been pressing online companies for greater voluntary efforts to refrain from the massive, systematic gathering of information about individual consumer web use and the long term retention of such data in a form that can identify the web habits, interests, searches, and purchases of individual Americans."

In August, Markey's committee asked major ISPs and Internet companies to provide detailed information about how they collect and store information about Web users' Internet activity – a request with which they complied.