Yahoo Limits Retention of Personal Data to 90 days

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/technology/internet/18yahoo.html?ref=technology

by robg • 18 years ago

19 6 18 years ago

briansmith• 18 years ago

The headline is misleading and this story is horribly one-sided. It is written as though Yahoo's policy is a breakthrough for privacy:

"Under the new policy, Yahoo will delete the last eight bits of the Internet Protocol, or I.P., address associated with a search query after 90 days."

This is the same trick that Google is trying to play on us. Basically, they still retain all information they use to track you indefinitely, except for 8 bits of it. With decent data-mining software you can still identify somebody pretty accurately even without those 8 bits.

Here is a better story that gives better information: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081217/wr_nm/us_yahoo_data

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

The internal memo I got said "Anonymizing user log data". I doubt we are going to try to put it back together. You give us too much evil genius credit.

Haskell• 18 years ago

Removing the last 8 bits or, by the way, the whole IP address from the user log data DOESN'T make it anonymous.

http://tinyurl.com/l8rfm

"Yahoo will also hide cookie data related to each search log and strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number, from the query itself."

There's much more personal information in a few month of search logs than that.

bd• 18 years ago

Exactly. It's kind of like nuclear-test-ban once you already have supercomputer simulations that make real world tests unnecessary.

After all, it's just 33 bits you need to identify a person.

http://33bits.org/about/

aneesh• 18 years ago

"I.P. addresses are digital tags that can identify a specific computer"

That's misleading. An IP address can't always uniquely identify the client computer. For starters, people can use proxies or anonymizers.

"Yahoo will also ... strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number"

Who is giving their SSN to Yahoo, and why??

lacker• 18 years ago

Anyone who searches on a social security number to see if it has leaked online anywhere.

Yahoo Limits Retention of Personal Data to 90 days

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