Redmond, Washington — Succumbing to pressure from European privacy regulators, Microsoft said Tuesday that it has agreed to cooperate with the European Commission by reducing the amount time it retains Bing search data to six months, in compliance with new rules, which is aimed at putting pressure on its biggest rival.
In a latest turn of events in the search-engine wars is revisiting privacy policies. With significant pressure from the European Commission has compelled the Redmond software maker to rework its Bing’s data retention policy and to discard user data after six months.
Previously, Microsoft has been retaining the search information from Bing for 18 months, but to comply with a new European Commission directive on Internet privacy the company will delete the IP addresses entirely after six months. Microsoft’s Bing decision puts pressure on Google to slash its retention time.
Microsoft has outlined a new privacy policy for Bing that reduces the amount of time that IP addresses are stored. (Credit: Microsoft)
John Vassallo, a Microsoft vice president and associate general counsel, asserted that the company would implement the new policy over the next 18 months.
Microsoft’s Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen formulated the change as an ongoing evaluation of the company’s Internet search privacy practices. That evaluation, he said, led to the change in Microsoft’s data-retention policy that will see the company delete the entire Internet Protocol address associated with search queries at six months.
“This change reflects a number of factors including a continuing evaluation of our business needs, the current competitive landscape and our ongoing dialogue with privacy advocates, consumer groups, and regulators,” Cullen said in a blog post explaining the shift in policy.
Cullen specifically mentioned to regulators from the European Union’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which has been compelling companies to comply with its recommendation to expunge any data that could be linked to individuals after no more than six months.
The compromise, relatively painless for Microsoft given its petite share of the global search market — just 3 percent — is yet another example of an American technology giant’s changing its way of doing business to suit stricter European concepts of antitrust and privacy laws.
Nevertheless, the company intends to appease the European advisory group that had been decisive of how search engines accumulate and retain data on individuals for advertising purposes, said Vassallo.
Yahoo in December 2008, altered its data-retention policy that promised to anonymize user log data within 90 days, with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations, while Google took steps to anonymize searchers’ IP addresses after nine months.
Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said today that the company plans to continue to keep information about searchers’ IP addresses for nine months. “We are committed to using data both to improve our services and our security measures for our users and to protect their privacy, and we remain convinced that our current logs retention policy represents a responsible balance,” he said in a statement.
The European Commission in December dropped an antitrust case against Microsoft after the software maker took the exemplary step of agreeing to distribute the browsers of its competitors through its Windows operating system.
Unlike the software maker’s recent agreement on browsers, which will be restricted only to consumers in Europe, Microsoft’s decision to discard data will affect users around the world, including in the United States.
Hendrik Speck, a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Kaiserslautern, Germany, asserted that rivals would probably follow Microsoft’s decision because consumers nowadays are increasingly worried about online privacy amid far-flung data theft and rising use of social networks.
“Google and other engines are beginning to comprehend that consumers around the world are placing an increasing value on privacy and that can have business consequences,” Professor Speck said.
But Microsoft’s decision could setup a new competitive field for the search industry: privacy. The recent cyberattacks on Google and other companies have already triggered questions about just how safe the personal information stored by Google and other search companies is from those who could exploit it in criminal ways.