As per the latest announcement from Yahoo, the second major search giant will restrict its user data retention to 90 days. Yahoo like all the other major search engines collects user data under the pretext of improving their performance and accuracy of search results. Yahoo has been storing the information that it collect including the data pertaining to the searches made that can be tracked back to individual computers or individuals.
The latest data retention policy announced by Yahoo can possibly put its competitors who refuse to abide by the 90 days rule under pressure. Microsoft had already announced that it is ready to change its data retention policy as long as everyone in the industry follows the same norms. Number of privacy advocates are working towards bringing in a legislation that will control the search engines’ data retention policy. One of the major problems so far has been that there was no legislation to control. As this is a new need that is felt, new laws have to come in place.
Edward J. Markey who is a Massachusetts Democrat and Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet has urged other major industry players to review their data retention policies to match Yahoo’s policy. Prior to the changes announced, Yahoo was retaining the data for 13 months, Google retained the data for 9 months and Microsoft retained the data for the longest period of time, 18 month.
There has been tremendous pressure from the European pockets who force the search engines to reduce their data retention period to a maximum of six month. However, Yahoo has announced a surprising 90 days limitation on itself. According to Anne Toth, the vice president of policy at Yahoo, stated that Yahoo has chosen a shorter period just to ensure that it wanted to get the issue off the table and Yahoo also hopes that this move will win users who are more concerned about their privacy.
However, the question is that are users really aware of the privacy issues that they are subjecting themselves to or not. Not many users are aware of the data retention; a vast majority of people would not even know that search engines are gathering information about their search patterns and other personal information that can go a long way in terms of associating searches with the users. This can be inferred from what happened with one of the features announced by Ask.com. This new feature called AskEraser was announced by Ask.com last year and not many people fancied it. It did not get enough attention that it should have got.
As per the latest policy, Yahoo will delete the relevant IP data that can be used to track the users to the searches. It will delete the last 8 bits of the IP. Once this information is deleted, it is not possible to track back to individual users. All the personal information including name, address, phone number, social security number, etc., will be purged from their system after the stipulated data retention period.