Microsoft wants Google, Yahoo on board before it adopt rules

Microsoft said, Google and Yahoo to cut the time they keep users search-engine records and to agree to the European demand. On Sunday in telephone interview, Brendon lynch, the company’s director of privacy strategy said Microsoft is able to meet the requirements, it wants to waits until its larger search rivals get in to board.

A group of European union officials dubbed the articles 29Data Protection Working Party have asked search engine to purge their user records after six months.

Brendon Lynch said proposals are feasible, but they want them to adopt it industry wide. If Microsoft alone adopts the 29Data Protection Working Party then it would not have broad impact on its users in Europe because the market share there is very small.

Cutting the length of time that search engines maintain such records could munch into advertising revenue, the core source of sales for Google and Yahoo. The companies rely on users queries to target advertising that have raised privacy question, since all the search engine have track where customer go online and what they read and buy.

In April, the Article 29 group said Search engine providers break their EU privacy law, by retaining the online search data for more than six months. The association is made up of data-protection officials from the 27 EU nations and from three non-Eu countries, including Norway.

Google have decided to cut the time and to keep data to nine months. In July 2007, Microsoft said after 18 months it will remove identifiers from individual search data. In the same month Yahoo said it would adopt a 13-month cutoff. Both Microsoft and Yahoo follow Google in European internet search traffic. According to the research company ComScore, Google has almost 80 percent of the market, while Microsoft and Yahoo together acquire about 4 percent.

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