Microsoft to Keep Bing Search Data for Just Six Months
In compliance with the European Union, Microsoft agrees to discard search history and IP addresses after six months. But, are the competitors on board with Microsoft’s Bing?
Privacy laws have long time been an issue since the start of the Internet. Internet users are apprehensive about search engines storing data because of privacy and data theft issues. While search domains do not plan to use this stored information against the user, just having the ability has caused alarm for many. The actual intent for storing search history is for the benefit of keying advertisements to each user to maximize effectiveness.
Google, the top competitor containing two-thirds of the shares of the global search market, according to comScore Reports (2010), did not address their compliance with requests from the European Union in a statement. Yahoo, on the other hand, did agree and delete the IP address after 90 days, but said they would only make the search data anonymous.
References:
Barnett, Emma. (January 19, 2010). Microsoft Pledges to Delete Bing User Data After Six Months. Telegraph. Last accessed January 26, 2010, at www.telegraph.co.uk.
comScore Reports. (January 22, 2010). comScore Reports Global Search Market Growth of 46 Percent in 2009. comScore, Inc. Last accessed January 26, 2010, at http://markets.on.nytimes.com.
O’Brien, Kevin J. (January 20, 2010). Microsoft Puts a Time Limit on Bing Data. New York Times. Section B, page 5.