Yahoo reduces logs to three months

Just 90 days is the new privacy standard announced by Yahoo. That is how much they will keep logs of all user actions (including requests to the search engine with reference to IP addresses, page views, advertising cookies, etc.), and then promise to permanently delete this private information. These are the toughest privacy rules among all major Internet companies. In other words, Yahoo is setting a new privacy standard and you can expect Google, Microsoft and others to follow its example soon. To date, Yahoo has been logging for 13 months. Google removes some of the information from the logs after 9 months. Microsoft has a private data retention period of 18 months.

New rules for search logs come into effect in January. For all other Yahoo services, similar rules will be implemented gradually, until mid-2010.

At the same time, some search engines provide completely anonymous access to their service and do not store logs in any way at all. For example, the AskEraser function works on the Ask.com search engine.