• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, July 23, 2007

As Google faces mounting criticism over its data- retention practices, rivals Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo are touting improvements to their own privacy policies.

Microsoft says it will only hold onto data that ties users' IP addresses to their search queries for 18 months. The company will let users opt out of its behavioral targeting programs, which would otherwise send them ads based on their Web-surfing history. Yahoo said it will anonymize the search logs after 13 months.

The moves take aim at a major Google vulnerability. The company, currently hoping to purchase DoubleClick, must first persuade the FTC to OK the deal. But consumer privacy groups have been pushing hard for reassurance that Google won't use DoubleClick's data about people's Web-surfing to compile detailed user profiles.

The European Union also has made clear it isn't happy with Google's previous record-keeping practices, specifically, its history of storing search queries and IP logs. Google recently said it will unbundle the queries from IP addresses after 18 months, but even this is long enough for damage to be done to users.

Consider: AOL's "Data Valdez," in which the company released hundreds of thousands of users' search logs that were less than six months old. While AOL said it had made IP addresses anonymous, the queries themselves revealed people's identities.