14 DAY TRIAL // A small presence on the global search engine market, behind Google and Yahoo, but also inferior in terms of share to localized services such as the Chinese Baidu, Microsoft's Live Search is already prepared to meet strong standards for data anonymisation. In this context, the Redmond company indicated at the start of this week that it could fully comply with the European Union's Article 29 Working Party, which imposed a six-month deadline for the anonymisation of all the data gathered from users of search engines. However, at the same time, Microsoft emphasized that it would modify its search policies only in the context in which rival companies also running search engines would adopt the same user privacy standards.
“Microsoft has announced that we are prepared to meet the Article 29 Working Party’s search anonymisation guidelines, but believe it is imperative that all search companies adopt the same standard to truly protect people’s privacy. We’ve evaluated the multiple uses of search data, and believe that we can, in time, move to a six month timeframe, while retaining our strong method of anonymisation” revealed John Vassallo, vice president, EU Affairs and associate general counsel.
“We are prepared to make this change and applaud the Working Party for its leadership on industry standards and look forward to continuing a productive dialog with them and other key stakeholders on how to make industry standards a reality.”
Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft, explained that the software giant supported strong anonymisation policies for search engines because users could, indeed, be identified from the information stored following their queries even from partial IP addresses. Microsoft already deletes the complete IP and not just a single octet as rival companies do. At the same time, the Redmond company also scraps cross-session identifiers including persistent cookie IDs in order to protect user privacy. According to Cullen, Microsoft would not have to go to any extra efforts in order to adopt the new policy.
“Search data is used for a variety of essential purposes, including improving the relevancy and quality of the search results, contributing to the effectiveness of advertising, ensuring the integrity of the search engine business model, and protecting against security threats. We are continually evaluating our data collection, use and retention practices so we can balance the need to offer people innovative products and services while also protecting their privacy,” Cullen said.