Privacy goes to Washington

Posted June 18th, 2009 at 7:25 pm by Anne Toth, Privacy & Policy

 3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Today I testified before the House Energy & Commerce Committee at a hearing titled “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices and Consumers’ Expectations.” The Committee has been examining consumer privacy issues for Internet advertising and wants to understand what companies are doing to protect people.

In my remarks today (which you can find here – PDF), I conveyed Yahoo!’s long leadership on privacy matters and shared our comprehensive approach to this issue. We believe the best approach to user privacy is one that provides people with plenty of transparency, gives them a chance to opt-out of things they don’t want, and educates them about their choices, while also putting limits on how much information we hold and how long we it.

Last December we announced an industry-leading data retention policy, which the New York Times described as “…an encouraging development for the cause of Internet privacy.” We now hold your data in identifiable form for just 90 days (with some limited exceptions) — the shortest duration in the industry. And we apply it to the widest array of data, far outpacing our competitors.

Most people recognize and accept that online advertising fuels the largely free Internet economy. Their only caveat often is that if they do have advertising, they want to see ads that are relevant to their needs and interests — and I often hear from them when it’s not. We want every page on Yahoo! to be relevant and compelling both in terms of content and advertising. This marriage provides the best possible user experience and it is what Yahoo! is all about.

But we understand that not all users share the same views, so Yahoo! makes an opt out available. For most online advertising, we believe a good opt out paired with responsible data retention policies is the right default setting. It offers meaningful privacy protections while providing the best possible user experience. A good opt out needs to be prominent, readily accessible, clearly conveyed, and have options for persistency. Yahoo! has been working to ensure that our opt out is exactly that. Head to our Privacy Center for more on how to manage your preferences.

Privacy is at the core of our trusted relationship with more than 500 million users around the globe. In my more than 11 years of overseeing our policy decisions, I’ve learned that advances in consumer protection are most often driven by the industry and we hope that Congress will consider an approach that allows us to continue keeping pace with not only technology advances, but also your demands and expectations.

Anne Toth
VP Policy, Head of Privacy

Photo from kimberlyfaye

Tagged: privacy

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3 Comments Add your own

Richard Hart | June 19th, 2009 at 11:30 am

Hey it’s great that you’re focused on privacy. How about also focusing on fixing your core email program? The Search function just doesn’t work.
Thanks

Sean | June 22nd, 2009 at 1:48 pm

Anne,

Please could you look into your Safe Harbor compliance obligations, specifically Data Integrity?

Your Yahoo! profiles team have stopped users modifying their old profile? No problem you may think, its redundant, but this is not the case; Yahoo! Chat, Yahoo! Games and Yahoo! Groups, at the least, are still pulling this “old” data through. This data has now been frozen at a point in time, and it’s integrity is now compromised as users cannot keep it up to date.

This isn’t exactly a recent change either, it has been like this for over six months.

Sean.

Anne Toth | June 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm

@Sean. Thanks for the comment. We’re looking into this for you. Hold, please…