Under pressure form U.S. and European regulators, Google and other search companies have recently announced new policies to delete old user data, remove personal information from stored search records and even give users the option of having all search records deleted.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy organization in Washington that has worked with some of those companies, compared the storage practices and privacy policies of the five largest providers, and made a series of recommendations on how to strengthen privacy protections.
Google and Microsoft, for example, plan to keep search data 18 months before deleting it. Yahoo said it plans by mid-2008 to hold such data 13 months. Ask.com, which shares its data with Google, will offer a service called AskEraser, giving users the option of having search data deleted after a few hours.
"This trend toward self-regulation by these companies is important, but we still need some baseline privacy legislation that would provide minimum standards to protect users," said Leslie Harris, president of the center. "And besides the big companies, there are a lot of bad actors out there."
Add this link to...
Tell a friend
Bury
Add to:
| Bookmarks
2 Comments
Comments
Sounds like a move in the right direction, but 18 months???
They've got a long ways to go!
They have kept this data in storage for so long that 18 months doesn't even seem to be that long. http://tinyurl.com/6o8mjb