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Microsoft To Delete Bing IP Data After 6 Months
adeelarshad82 writes "Bowing to pressure from the EU, Microsoft said it would discard all data collected via its Bing search engine after six months. (Microsoft's announcement contains a timeline for what data gets anonymized or deleted when.) Until now, the software giant has retained the data for 18 months. Over the past two years, however, Internet companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have made efforts to reduce the amount of time that information is stored. Microsoft's policies will remain the same, but now, the company will delete the IP address and other info after six months. Back in December 2008, Microsoft said it would reduce its retention time to six months, but only if its rivals followed suit. At the time, Yahoo anonymized its data after 13 months, and Google did the same after 9 months. A week later, Yahoo cut that time down to three months, but Google said its decisions are not conditioned on what competitors do."
After Google's CEO's comments about privacy is only wanted by wrongdoers and their massive influence all over the internet, mobile phones and soon desktop I'm starting to think Bing might be better. Like the summary states, Google says its decisions "aren't conditioned on what competitors do" and they want to do what they want. Seems like they got huge and got piss in their head.
When credit is due, I have to give it. Bing is done correctly, and Google seems like the falling star it once was. We want privacy - give it to us.
Smart move Microsoft, even if it was due to pressure, not choice. This might entice a few people from Google to Bing. It certainly interests me.
Google won't follow suit? The difference here is that Bing is a loss leader for Microsoft. People want more privacy? No problem sez Microsoft, whatever. It's not like they live off the data they mine from their search engine users (which last I heard was something like 4% of the total in the US).
For Google, government-mandated privacy regulations can really hurt the bottom line. That data and how long they can hold on to it is essentially their business model.
I actually wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft become a champion of consumer privacy on the Internet later on... you know, for the children.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
They are hosting Bing's IP data on their Danger servers, which naturally lose data about that often.
That's how they're going to differentiate themselves in a mature saturated industry - by being good. Maybe Balmer was visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve.
Yep. Microsoft is good. Google is Evil and Apple is on their way. We also have a black president - I think this is an alternate universe that I somehow got sent to. I'm a physicist at LHC and things were going great until recently .... I don't know. Geeze, My heart is just pitter patting - my right side of my body can feel it.
Why is it that advertisers can do what the courts must allow police to do and thats to spy on us. Police need a court order to spy on what we do.Advertisers can spy on us in the names of making a profit for there shareholders. And if they copy the IP addresses its not anonymous,that ip address will point to a very real human unless ofcouser they ip address changes daily,but i would guess its isps like AOL that change the ip address all the time. My ip address hasn't changed in over a year. Anonuious means they cant tell if your a male,female,where you live,they know nothing about the person and it cant be guessed.
Jack of all trades,master of none
If you want privacy it looks like Yahoo is clearly the winner here. Thankfully you can use their engine and avoid the madness with http://www.altavista.com/
I never moved on to Google from Altavista and haven't seen a good reason to yet. Only reasons not to.
Mozilla says Bing is better than GMail in regards to privacy. Even Steven Balmer has something to say about Google keeping info for two years... http://lonerboner.com/hatebomb-fuck-google-theyre-the-evil-empire
Well that's different!
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The EU is whining about Bling (which is a good thing for our privacy btw) but is also pressing for data retention laws in every EU country (ofcourse using "the war on terrorism" as its motto) and succeeded.
The EU suggested storing the data for as long as 24 months, the Netherlands for example went for 12 months and stepped back to 6 months eventually. Belgium is probably still going for 24 months.
Now I'm wondering who will hurt my privacy more, Bling, Google or the government with its archive of my travel data (new travel cards with rfid in the Netherlands), email data, phone data, medical data (EPD), fingerprint and for some DNA data and soon GPS data in a carbox to track the miles you make for miletaxes (Called Kilometerheffing in dutch).
More like glass half empty if you ask me. The summary should read "Microsoft To Keep Bing IP Data For 6 Months!"
Is this what passes for "respecting privacy" in 2010? Yes, I understand that this is an improvement over it's previous policy, but in my book, logging IPs at all is too much. I'm of the opinion that anonymity is, overall, a good thing, no matter how many "terrorists" use the Internet to look up bomb recipes.
I might be okay with private companies tracking your IP if not for the fact that these private companies are too easily and too often compelled to hand over such data to the government, and if the government's uses of that information were not so frequently frivolous and/or nefarious. Not to mention the cases where companies have been willing participants in illegal government snooping, such as with the AT&T wiretapping case. Can anybody honestly suggest that we should all just trust Microsoft (or Yahoo, Google, etc) to keep our private data safe? Heck, when they're not busy willingly handing it over to the government, they're selling it off as marketing fodder.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the government ought to need a proper search warrant if it wants to know everything I've searched for on Google for the past 6 months, or even how many times I've visited the site.
Google has selective privacy - it protects some and uncovers the others. According to which criteria is not disclosed. Make your judgment. MS and Yahoo are even worse.
I search my name in Bing and get irrelevant results. (right first name wrong surname or the other way around).
Searching my name in quotation marks finds people who are long dead or listed as award recipients and have never been on the internet since.
It thinks i live in the UK (I live in Australia).
I search in google and i get my facebook twitter and linkedin account as the first three results with or without quotation marks plus other relevent stuff. google wins.
A decision about whether and how long to keep what data essentially boils down to a question of economics. Keeping some data is quite obviously valuable because it allows both for better tuning of search engine results AND targeted advertising which opens the door both to more relevant searches or better profits (most probably both). However, if keeping some data is good then keeping more is not always better. First, more data may not necessarily improve search results, particularly if the new data simply reinforces an existing rule or pattern in the search agent (assuming that AI methods are being used). Second, the more data you have stored the more attractive a target you become to various governments around the world (as Google is learning first-hand with Chinese hacking incidents and previously with the DOJ fishing expeditions). Finally, even if you could store everything the cost would be tremendous; even for big companies like Microsoft and Google. Looking at all of the data coming across the wire on the public Internet backbones and storing it is like looking into the Sun or drinking from a fire hose turned on full blast; there are reasons why people don't generally attempt these things (or at least not for indefinite periods of time). Thus, there is a balance to be struck between storing everything and storing nothing; the question is how much and what to store and I believe that the market will ultimately work that one out.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and pretty much everyone else with a big enough data center, records everything every user does. In the case of the Big Three, they record every click, every window open and close, every tab open and close, every URL (except HTTPS) browsed to any way, in near real time. (Why did you think they released those toolbars?) All of these are associated with a GUID (This is NOT your IP address. DHCP and laptops makes these worthless after a few hours. They want to track people. Not NICs.) The GUID, is SHA1 hashed, so researchers can't recover it.
The fact is, no one bothers to try to put everything together, because you can do pretty much everything you want without needing to read someone's email or anything. (Yes, they do that too. But you already knew that with GMail ads right?)
Quite honestly, no one cares about any one user, because there are millions of users, and billions of pages viewed. As a researcher, you want to watch the swarm. An individual gnat, isn't that interesting.
Someone should delete Microsoft. Criminal monopoly. Expensive date.
See subject. Sorry, I've not even bothered looking at Bing, so no further comment.
At launch of Bing I have used it to test it and I haven't found any feature that would break my addition to Google. Even if Bing was as good as Google it is still different and requires me to learn a new tool. The only reason I would have learnt a new tool would be if it was any better - but it is not. At least in my opinion.
So my question is - does anybody even use Bing? Recently I recall that I have used Bing only when I gived the search box at MSFT KB/Support pages (which use Bing) and it just failed for simple queries like "download something-microsoftish". Google is much better even when searching MSFT sites.
Yes and I know that Google != privacy. But I can cope with that if it works OK.
Why would Microsoft say "it would reduce its retention time to six months, but only if its rivals followed suit"? What difference does it make what their competitors do in this regard? How does keeping the IP data for longer give them any real advantage?
Sure they can target advertisments based on my search queries, but then they can also do it based on the current site that I'm on. At least they know what I am reading know is still relevant to me. Ever since the court case, I'm not interested in that thing I was searching for 6 months ago. (Oh, what a giveaway!)
The fact that they resisted voluntarily reducing the retention time suggests that they are doing something that I would prefer that they didn't do. I just don't know what it is.
Microsoft's policies will remain the same, but now, the company will delete the IP address and other info after six months.
So their policies will remain the same, but their policies are going to change?
Bing just has a lot more data now than it had before. IE8 "suggested sites" feature sends everything to them. After a certain point the costs of having a dataset of enormous size begin to outweigh the benefits, so people either sample the old data, or delete it outright.
I suspect this is what's happening in this case as well.
Fire up Tor:
https://www.torproject.org/
Properly configure it and use Scroogle SSL:
https://ssl.scroogle.org/
Couple it with a decent mail client not requiring cookies or script:
https://www.safe-mail.net/
Problem solved!
I have no desire or need for Microsoft/Google's direct offerings and surely not mail from either when Tor + Safe-Mail SSL does the job without scripts, cookies, flash, java, etc.
Exit nodes? Hah! It's all SSL, baby! (provided the user verifies everything is correct and in order)
Do you really, really, REALLY trust Microsoft (or Google)? HAHAHAHAH!
If it's not encrypted, it's not worth a SHIT.
None of it is done correctly (regarding insecure unencrypted websites), if you search naked without something like tor & ssl, you are stupid.
Er, Bing might not be 'as worse' as Google anymore when it comes to privacy, but I definitely wouldn't say it's "done correctly" either.
You may want to check out ixquick, a meta-search engine that doesn't log your IP etc at all -- that surely beats deleting some info after some time in my book.
(better yet, ixquick is also available over SSL, in case you're concerned about your ISP snooping too... Oh, hello Comcast...)
It doesn't matter what the privacy policy says if they don't follow it.