Yahoo! Inc., owner of the eponymous search engine, will reduce the time it retains personal data it has gathered related to web surfing to three months. This makes its retention policy the shortest among its competitors, according to the company’s Wednesday press release.

Yahoo! is going to “anonymize” the IP addresses of users usually within three months, where the previous standard was 13 months. It does however retain the data for up to six months in cases of fraud or system security breach.

Google, industry and market leader in this field, halved its own data retention time to nine months earlier this year, and Microsoft has promised to cut the time down to six months should its peers do the same.

Ari Schwartz, vice president of the privacy advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology, pointed out that Google was the first one to start the race when it cut the time to eighteen months.

He went on to call Yahoo’s promise more significant due to the short time – 90 days – after which data is removed, and the company’s actual implementation to get it done.

The official recommendation of the European Union is that search companies keep data for no more than six months, and called for the industry to adopt a pan-industry standard.

"This was our attempt to put a stake in the ground" said of the matter Yahoo’s vice president of policy and privacy Anne Toth.

Search engines earn their revenue by serving advertisements targeted to searche(r)s, and that is done by tracking the searchers’ web surfing activities so they know what ads to serve.

Schwartz added that once a company has made a commitment on data retention, that commitment is enforceable under federal and state laws in the U.S.