After announcing on December 17 a significant move to protect its users’ privacy, Yahoo seemed to have gained a holy crusader aura. Privacy advocates were quick to lavish it with praises and now they’re even more incensed when asking Google and Microsoft to follow in Yahoo’s footsteps.

To be more exact, Yahoo drastically shortened the time it let personal info about users linger in their data tanks. Like any other search engines, Yahoo needs information gathered when people make use of this service of theirs in order to better direct its profit-earning efforts - or provide better service, as the official line usually goes.

For a while now, and especially in Europe, Internet regulators have been pressuring the giants of the search engine regnum to keep personal data about users for six months only. Yahoo had been previously storing this information for no less than 13 months (it seems the longer it’s kept, the more it pays up), so the fact that they reduced the period to about 3 months is quite a bit of a shocker. Microsoft keeps user-related data for 18 months and Google for 9 months.
 
Only there’s a catch. After 90 days are gone, Yahoo will get rid of the information not by erasing users’ Internet Protocols, but by deleting the last eight bits of each. This method made some privacy advocates wary. According to the New York Times, they qualified it as inadequate for completely insuring user privacy.

Microsoft does keep the information the longest, but they do completely delete IPs after the 18 months are gone. Brandon Lynch, the company’s privacy director, said that “the method of anonymization is more important than the anonymization timeframe and believes all major search engines need to adopt a high standard.”

As for Google, it’s currently holding back on comments referring to Yahoo’s move, merely saying that it’s “continually evaluating” the balance between service quality and user privacy.