Report: Yahoo, Microsoft to reveal Web search privacy policies
The Financial Times is reporting that Yahoo and Microsoft will update their privacy polices within the next few weeks and publicly reveal how long they plan to keep data on consumer Web searches.
The action was prompted by the work of a group called the Article 29 Working Party, which advises the European Union on privacy policy and has also been in discussions with Google, the article says.
Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of online ad firm DoubleClick is being scrutinized by the European Commission following complaints from consumer and privacy groups there and in the U.S. that a merged company would give Google access to an unprecedented amount of online consumer data.
Several months ago, Google changed its data retention policies, saying it would anonymize the final eight bits of the IP address and cookie data after 18 to 24 months, unless legally required to retain it for longer. The information on specific searches will be retained indefinitely, but the partial anonymization will make it much more difficult to tie the searches to specific individuals or computers.
So far, neither Yahoo nor Microsoft have publicly detailed their data retention policies. A Yahoo representative did not return e-mails seeking comment on Friday. A Microsoft spokeswoman had this to say: "We can't confirm that. Microsoft doesn't have any information to share at this time."
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
to assume that every bit of information is routinely supplied to the
US government by Yahoo and Microsoft under Echelon.
To know more about PPC model of advertisement I had gone through number of articles/reports on Pay Per Click mechanism including the report of Dr. Tuzhilin (Professor of Information Systems at the Stern School of Business at New York University), who evaluated Google?s invalid click detection efforts (Find PDF Report [Source: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/07/25/revealed-how-google-manages-click-fraud/).
After going through all those articles and analyzing Google?s code I found a way to simulate human behavior in click generation and page impressions in proper (acceptable) ratio from different geographic location (IP address) and was able to credit thousands of dollars in my AdSense account (By not a single human being generated click).
So, do you realy think they are really having good things with them???
Contact me at manish.arora@mgoos.com if you like to know more...