At Yahoo!, data helps fuel the development of groundbreaking products for our users, partners and developers. We use all kinds of data for everything from powering innovative new products like Search Assist to showing you relevant news and information on our homepage to customizing advertising and content throughout Yahoo!’s network. We also analyze data to help fight the fraudsters that attack our systems.

Much of the data we use is information about our users’ online interests. The collection and use of that personal data demand that we take great care in managing and storing it. At Yahoo!, we feel a great responsibility to protect your privacy — we hold your trust sacred and work hard to earn it.

Today, we take another important step in our long record of privacy leadership. Last year, we committed to anonymizing the data we collect about your searches after 13 months. We are now reducing our retention time to 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security, and legal obligations. We’re also expanding our commitment to include data on page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks.

What this means is that our content and advertising customization will remain cutting-edge and relevant to your interests -- but the data we use to provide those services will only be kept for as long as we really need it.

How did we figure out “how long we really need it”? Led by my colleague Shane Wiley, the Insights Strategy Team worked with our business, product, and engineering teams around the globe to achieve the following goals:

• Meet the need for high quality consumer experience;
• Preserve the effectiveness of our advertising model and cutting-edge capabilities;
• Protect our users by fighting fraud and security threats; and
• Meet our legal obligations.

The result? We are setting a new industry benchmark by lowering the length of time we store non-anonymous data. Our new policy enables Yahoo! to continue providing the cutting-edge technologies and solutions advertisers and publishers expect while respecting your privacy.

Anne Toth
VP of Policy and Head of Privacy