Back on January 1
8, 2010, Microsoft announced that they would make advances with search privacy for Bing by shortening the amount of time it stores IP addresses of search queries from 18 months to six months. The company will delete IP addresses after six months but retain cookies and other session IDs for 18 months. This policy shift was brought by the European Union’s Article 29 Working Party, a panel comprised of national privacy regulators from each of the EU countries. They have asked Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to meet their demands to have data retention be cut to six months.
Microsoft’s move has drawn interest in possibly generating stronger competition in the area of privacy for the search industry. Currently, Google anonymizes data after nine months while Yahoo leads the way in shortening data retention by deleting IP addresses after three months. The highly publicized cyber attack on Google and other major companies has only further prompted concern as to how secure is information stored by search companies from exploitation.
Personally, I believe reducing the amount of data search companies store about us is a step in the right direction. However, the question here is can more be done? I believe so. The move to delete IP and Cross Session ID’s eventually need to be mandatory. In response to search companies like Google that argue user data logs are a vital component to their business that enable innovations, improvements to search quality, improve security and so forth. Those are valid points and search companies should be able to use data in a manner that benefits them financially and provides value to the public. However, at some point there needs to be a balance between business and user interests. Concerns about privacy will continue to grow as conscious users, advocacy groups and governments point to the issue.
Microsoft’s move may in some ways be purely out of the interest to be competitive against Google’s search engine in one area. But what they have done has only further prompted the need to reconsider the need for some kind of mandatory baseline for search providers to follow in terms of how much data they can retrain and for how long while still giving them the freedom to innovate their businesses.
Sources:
http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/workinggroup/index_en.htm
{ 3 } Comments
I agree with Andrew. This move even though a result of competition between rival companies has benefited users. And why not, competitive advantage is what regulates the market and maintains an equilibrium between user’s needs and company’s profits.
Anyway, search engines are making a lot of money from the stream of advertising revenues. They should not risk a user’s privacy and information just to earn some more!
A
What Search Engines can bring to the world is not the only the services that benefit information seeking, but also, and mostly importantly, is the responsibility: have well-designed policies that let users trust you on
a) you can protect my personal information
b) I feel safe while using your services
It is a balance between improving services (longer the data you keep, better data mining results you will have) and protecting privacy.
Well..I dont think it is in the interest of users. The reason search engines save IP addresses is for behavior profiling. They used to save IP adresses for 18 months initially and because of efficient alogorithms they could get the same information by saving only 6 months worth of behavior from each IP address. Search engines are still getting what they want, previously they needed 18 months now 6 months. If they care about user privacy, solution is not to store information at all..