Yahoo Shortens Time It Saves Data to 3 Months

12/17/2008

If you’re in Internet marketing, data about user behavior is like gold. Yahoo recently announced that it will only be saving data like Internet search records for three months. It used to save this type of information for 13 months. Why the change in policy?

Apparently the company is concerned about ongoing privacy concerns voiced by legislators from the U.S. and Europe. Internet users have long voiced concerns about how large Internet companies collect and store data about them as they browse online. Other Internet giants like Google and Microsoft may soon be pressured to follow Yahoo’s lead.

Both companies have already started to do this. For example, this past September, Google started to mask the IP addresses on its server logs after nine months. It had previously done so after 18 months. Microsoft, for its part has said that it will support an “industry standard” of storing data for only six months; down from a previous high of 18 months.

Yahoo’s new policy has four significant changes to its data: (i) taking out portions of a browser’s IP address; (ii) altering cookies; (iii) deleting other information that would make it easy to identify someone; and (iv) in cases of fraud and security breaches, anonymizing the data after six months.

Yahoo’s new policy is far reaching in that it will not only anonymize search engine logs, but info gleaned from page views and clicks, and clicks on ads as well. All of these changes will take place next month.

European and U.S. legislators have been putting increasing pressure on Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft over the last couple of years. Regulators have wanted Internet and communications companies to implement these kinds of policies.

The U.S. Congress has started to increase their interest in how companies store and use the information they gather to do what they call “personalized advertising.”

Now that Yahoo has implemented its official policy, legislators will most likely be comparing other companies against their standard.

For more insight visit Internet Marketing Services