Search engines have faced mounting scrutiny over their data retention and privacy practices, and Microsoft and Ask likely wish to head off potential increases in federal scrutiny.
Microsoft Joins Ask In Call For Privacy
thousands of search queries in 2006, all organized by anonymous identifiers. It proved easy to build profiles of each identifier, with quite a few of those profiles rendering a very unflattering picture of the searcher.
Following Google's announcement of their intent to anonymize search data after a period of time, and to make an essentially useless change to their cookie data, Microsoft and Ask want to
Dialogue, from the same companies that rolled over to federal subpoenas for search data a couple of years ago. The time for talk has passed. Anyone in search who seriously wants to protect the privacy of their users needs to be deleting search data after a period of time, in compliance with whatever retention periods exist as mandated by law.
Instead of dialogue, how about placing a shell script that wipes out log files on the relevant servers on an ongoing basis as time passes? That has to be an easier and faster solution than just talking about it. 
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