yahoo has announced plans to extend how long it holds user search records from 90 days to 18 months.
The move is expected to provoke a backlash from privacy groups who fear a creeping 'Big Brother' approach from the internet giant.
Yahoo claimed a changing 'competitive landscape' over the past three years had forced the decision
Customers will be notified of the new rules in the next six weeks and they will come
into operation in July. Raw search logs can include information like addresses, Internet provider, page views, ad clicks or web sites visited.
Chief executive: Carol Bartz
Such data, which is used to target online advertising, is kept for 90 days by Yahoo before it strips out numerical internet addresses, altering small tracking files known as 'cookies' and deleting other potential personally identifiable information.
Anne Toth, Yahoo's chief trust officer, wrote in a blog post: 'We will be closely examining what the right policy and time frame should be for other log file data,'
'In announcing this change, we have gone back to the drawing board to ensure that our policies will support the innovative products we want to deliver for our consumers.'
But there have been concerns from privacy groups as to how this data is used.
In August 2008, Congress asked providers like Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to provide information about how they collect and store information about web users' Internet activity.
At the time, many companies preserved the anonymity of the customers' data after 18 months.
In September 2008, Google announced that it would reduce that time to nine months. Yahoo followed suit in December by cutting it from 13 months to three months.
But now Yahoo has claimed that the way it and other companies offer services online 'has changed dramatically.'
Toth said: 'Over the past several years it's clear that the Internet has changed, our business has changed, and the competitive landscape has changed,'
In recent months, the concept of having a "do not track" option in the browser has grown. The feature allows users to opt-out of having their activity tracked online for advertising purposes.
Mozilla included the option in its Firefox 4 browser, and Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all experimenting with their own versions of do not track'
Toth said Friday that it is in 'active in discussions' on how to integrate browser-based tools into existing privacy models.
Jeff Chester , an online campaigner for privacy with the Center for Digital Democracy, described the Yahoo move as 'digital desperation'
He added: 'This is a digital flip-flop by Yahoo. It can't compete with Facebook, Google or Microsoft because it has nothing left to sell
'So it is giving advertisers a long look at the data so it won't go into a financial tailspin and investors don't lose confidence. This is simply to boost revenues
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