FPF Commends Yahoo Privacy Announcement

The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) applauds the Yahoo! announcement today that the company has sharpened its privacy practices with a new global data retention policy. FPF Co-chair Jules Polonetsky called for such steps last week in his blog posting. We are delighted to see a great example of advancing privacy in a business practical manner.
Thanks to Tech Policy Central for noting our advocacy in this area.
The new Yahoo! policy will truncate IP addresses and cookies for search and, very importantly, for adserving logfiles. Most will be deleted at three months, with a subset of data remaining 6 months for security and fraud purposes. Google has previously enhanced practices in this area by announcing a 9 month time frame for search data, and per our earlier post, Microsoft is considering 6 months.
Whether the sweet spot is 6 months or 9 months, the engineers are finding the minimum time needed to use data to create and improve a great service. We see this as an important step towards a common set of privacy principles that can apply to everyone in the internet space – which will be of benefit to all businesses and consumers.