Yahoo Now Leads User Privacy Game: 90 Days versus Google’s 9 Months

It is no wonder that given our mostly online lifestyle we begin to care more and more about our privacy: after all, when you give so much information about yourself away, you can’t help but wonder how people who have access to this information will use it (or rather will they use it at all). Now that both users and various regulators and privacy advocates demand that internet companies (search engines in particular) be open about their privacy policy and at least try not to keep as much user information as they currently do, the leading search engines seem to react.

Back in September we discussed two steps Google took to protect user privacy: reducing data retention period from 18 months to 9 months and improving Google Suggest functionality for its search engine to avoid sending everything we type to Google servers right at the time of typing with some of this information stored as well. At the time the search giant complained as much as they could trying to explain that the quality of service the company provides to us depends heavily on how long they can keep the information we give them.

Today Yahoo seems to be much more enthusiastic about its own policy in terms of the privacy level it offers to the users. The newly-announced global data retention policy stipulates for keeping personally identifiable data for 90 days only and anonymizing it after this period. This policy is not even for search only - it covers page views, clicks on pages, ad views and ad clicks as well.

There are actually some exceptions related to potential fraud (data can be retained for up to 6 months) and security and legal obligations the company has (data can be retained for unspecified time period) but otherwise a regular user should not be worried that the internet company will remember everything he or she did a few months ago. All in all Yahoo admits that this could damage the relevance of content and ads they serve to visitors but the decision is that user privacy is of higher importance. Moreover, I have a feeling that the survey carried out in Yahoo to determine exactly what retention period is actually required to ensure high quality of service demonstrated that data retention for lengthy time periods is not even needed as users won’t see the difference anyway while those who care about privacy will also feel more secure using Yahoo over other search engines.

So unlike Google that demonstrated disappointment and total unwillingness to keep its hands off our data after a time period of nine (!) months, Yahoo has decided to get some good PR from their own announcement today and sent press members their news in an email titled “Yahoo! Sets New Industry Privacy Standard with Data Retention Policy”. Of course I would not expect this to be a volunteer decision on behalf of Yahoo as the scrutiny by various privacy advocates has been harsh on both Google and Yahoo, at least Yahoo knows how to use their privacy initiatives to try and win some extra trust from their users concerned about privacy.