14 DAY TRIAL // The Sunnyvale giant Yahoo announced that it joined the alliance of Google and Microsoft and decided to reduce the period to make user data anonymous to no less than 13 months. This is the shortest amount of time granted by a company since Google chose to anonymize the user data after 18 months, similar with the Microsoft policy. According to PC World, Yahoo will delete all the user data after 13 months unless the users require them to expand the period or the authorities demand private information about the consumers.
"One of the core tenets of this company is the relationship and trust we have with our users," said Yahoo spokesman Jim Cullinan in a statement e-mailed to Computerworld, PC World reported today. "We believe the 13 month policy is the appropriate timeline to meet our commitment to our users' privacy while preserving our ability to continue to defend against fraudulent activity and improve our services to advertisers, publishers and users."
The Internet giants are involved into a serious problem because it all started with Google that indirectly forced its rivals to modify the privacy policies. As you might have heard, the Mountain View company was criticized by the EU for weak privacy policies that were not protecting the users. Immediately, the search giant started to work on them, announcing that it reduced the anonymization period to 18 months. However, Google said that this period might be extended in special countries where the laws require them to anonymize the logs after 24 months.
The campaign was continued by Microsoft and Ask.com, another search engine that was the most original company when it comes to privacy policies. Ask.com created a special function, codename AskEraser that allows users to search the Internet and remain anonymous without worrying about the information left on their servers.