The Redmond, Wash. company has endorsed European guidelines defined in April suggesting that search engines should not keep sensitive information--ranging from Internet protocol (IP) addresses to information from tracking cookies--beyond six months without anonymizing the data.
Microsoft's MSN Live retains search data for 18 months. Yahoo has a 13-month retention for search data, and Google nine months.
Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel at Google, said the company continues to work with the European authorities to balance the need for innovation with the privacy of users. "Earlier this year, we already moved to anonymize IP addresses in our server logs after nine months--significantly shorter than our previous 18-month retention policy," he said. "Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy."--Laurie Sullivan