Recently, Yahoo! announced that its data retention policy from 13 months has been reduced to just 3 months. Now, people are eager to know what would be the reaction of Google to this news.

As far as the users’ experience with Yahoo! is concerned, they are not going to notice any difference, regarding its products or services, or any other facility. Moreover, advertising procedure on Yahoo! will remain the same as the earlier.

“In our world of customized online services, responsible use of data is critical to establishing and maintaining user trust,” said Anne Toth, Yahoo’s vice president of policy. “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.”

“This policy represents Yahoo’s assessment of the minimum amount of time we need to retain data in order to respond to the needs of our business while deepening our trusted relationship with users,” Toth said. “We’re proud this new policy sets a new benchmark for the industry.”

“What we’ve done since April is evaluate the multiple uses of search data to ascertain if we can, in time, move to a six-month time frame,” said Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist. “Our answer is yes, we can, but we don’t believe it makes sense for us to make this change until our competitors also commit to meeting this higher standard with respect to both the method and time frame for anonymization.”

It seems that Google is not that interested in making such a move, since it has already decided to reduce the period of keeping personal information in its datalogs to 9 months. However, this move is certainly going to put pressure on other search engines!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 6:49 am and is filed under Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.