Bing: Advancing Search Privacy

Dominic Carr
Director, Microsoft News Center

Privacy online is an important issue facing everyone as we spend more of our life, and carry out more of our business, online.  Everyone needs to be able to have confidence that their privacy is being protected.  It is an issue Microsoft takes very seriously.  Today we announced an important change in our data retention policies for Bing users, as a result of our ongoing review of practices and our work with the Article 29 Working Party in Europe.  

Peter Cullen, the company’s chief privacy strategist, outlines these changes in his blog post on Microsoft on the Issues.

In addition to the already strong privacy practices for online search data that Peter outlines in his post, we are announcing today that we will delete the entire Internet Protocol address associated with search queries at 6 months rather than the current 18 months.

As Peter highlights there are good reasons to maintain and review search data but we are committed to protecting consumer privacy and a productive dialog with our customers and all other stakeholders.

 

Tags: ,