Bing now keeps IP records for 6 months, instead of a year and a half

In response to new European Union regulations, Microsoft has reduced the amount of time Bing will associate your IP address with your search history. Up until now, Bing saved your searches, along with your full IP address, for 18 months. That's now been cut down to 6 months. Under the new plan, Microsoft will also stop storing your cross-session search cookies at 18 months, meaning they won't know that all of your separate search sessions came from the same person.

To put Bing's new privacy policies into perspective, you have to compare them with what happens at the biggest player in search, Google. Google waits 9 months before it will anonymize IP addresses to separate them from your account info and other data that could be used to ID you. Bing anonymizes immediately. At 18 months, Google deletes IP addresses, compared to Bing's new policy of clearing them after 6. Google has also made no indication that it will comply with the new EU regulations, which is perfectly in keeping with its recent attitude of standing up to governments it disagrees with.

[via CNET]

Tags: anonymous, bing, history, ip address, IpAddress, microsoft, privacy, search, search history, SearchHistory