Sunnyvale, California — Nearly three years ago, striving to please its vast audience, Yahoo appeared as a defender of privacy by stating it would retain detailed records of its users’ search queries for just 90 days. The company on Friday reversed course on its data retention policy, stating that it will hold on to users’ search engine queries for at least 18 months, abandoning an earlier policy under which it kept data for only three months.
Citing a changing “competitive landscape,” Yahoo released a statement asserting the move will give users “a more strong individualized experience” while it continues to value “innovation in the areas of transparency and choice to protect privacy.”
The retention of search term histories, which can contain personal topics such as medical conditions or financial issues, has long been a subject of disputes in debates over digital privacy. The company said it would then purge that information in an effort to “strengthen Yahoo’s relationship of trust” with its users.
“Since the past few years, the way we and other companies offer services online and the way consumers experience the Internet has changed, our business has changed, and the competitive environment too has changed significantly,” Anne Toth, Yahoo’s chief trust officer, said in a blog post.
Though the company attempted to reduce the length of data retention in the past, it has since reevaluated their policy on how long it will keep log file data –a file listing the actions that users take, such as where they go on the site and when.
“So, we have gone back to review our terms and to ensure that our policies will support the innovative products we want to deliver for our consumers. We have been reassessing our log file data retention policy in light of these changes and as a result of this review we are moving to align our log file data retention policy closer to the competitive norm across the industry,” read the statement.
Infuriated privacy advocates complain that the changes erode consumer privacy and amount to a flip-flop by Yahoo. They suspect that Yahoo intends to use the information gleaned from search queries, along with details about the pages they view and the ads users click on, to present users with more focused advertising.
“Frankly it was pretty disappointing,” Richard Esguerra, a senior activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of Yahoo’s decision.
He continued that “we felt like, good, search engines are finally getting that they can compete on privacy — that it is another piece of the puzzle.” But he said this “signals something different.”
It was also Toth who, in December 2008, stated that retaining the data for only three months would set Yahoo apart from its rivals and ingrain trust with the company’s users.
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, addressed Yahoo’s move “a bait and switch” and said he planned to complain to the Federal Trade Commission.
Yahoo will roll out the changes in the next four to six weeks, with a series of notifications, and then 30 days after it is done with these notices, the policy will go into effect. “We expect this will occur sometime in mid-to-late July,” according to Toth.
Nevertheless, these raw search logs can include information like IP addresses, Internet provider, or Web sites visited. After a certain amount of time, companies “anonymize” this data and delete things like IP address or other IDs associated with the query.
Furthermore, in recent months, the concept of having a “do not track” option in the browser has picked up steam. The feature would allow users to opt-out of having their activity tracked online for advertising purposes. Mozilla included the option in its Firefox 4 browser, and Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all experimenting with their own versions of “do not track.”
Toth said Friday that it is in “active discussions on how to incorporate browser-based ‘Do-Not-Track’ tools into existing privacy models, and are working on even more consumer tools within Yahoo products designed to put more control our users’ hands.”