Yahoo limits retention of personal & User data

Yahoo said Wednesday that it would limit to 90 days the time it holds some personally identifiable information related to searches to address growing concerns from privacy advocates, policy makers and government regulators.Yahoo’s new data retention policy is the most restrictive among major search engines in the United States and will most likely put pressure on rivals like Google and Microsoft to shorten the time they keep information about their users.

The strongest pressure on Internet companies so far came from European regulators who have been urging major search engines to reduce to six months the time they hold personally identifiable information. Microsoft said last week that it would agree to such a standard if its rivals also went along.

“Microsoft believes that the method of anonymization is more important than the anonymization timeframe and believes all major search engines need to adopt a high standard,” Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at Microsoft.

Google declined to comment directly on Yahoo’s new policy but said it was “continually evaluating” how to balance the services it offered with the privacy of its users. Google had said previously that discarding personally identifiable data sooner than nine months would undermine the quality of its search engine and other services.For More Information.Here