Yesterday we posted an article about the issue of privacy in relation to the internet. Worryingly the UK are only 5th (out of 25) on a league table of internet freedom. Obviously this doesn't mean the MI5 are watching all our computer screens all of the time in a big room in London, but innocent or not, if we press the wrong buttons then the consequences can be serious. If you for whatever reason get stuck under the radar of the police/state it's highly likely that one of things that will happen to you is that your search results will be backtracked and if 'evidence' is found it will be used against you.
There's only a handful of URLs we know off by heart therefore the majority of our internet experience stems from search engine results, and you can tell a lot about a person from their search history.
Trying anything to beat Google, Yahoo had been trying to promote itself as the most private web search engine. It had promised to take privacy seriously and had started (in 2008) to keep information for only 90 days. But now just as a report highlights the issue of web freedom Yahoo have taken a large and unexplained U-turn changing the length of search log storage back to 18 months (rejoining Google and Microsoft.) “Yahoo is absolutely backtracking from what had been an industry-leading position” said Erica Newland from watchdog group 'Center for Democracy & Technology.'
In the old system Yahoo would make data anonymous after three months by cutting out parts of users’ IP addresses, altering cookies, and deleting personal information. Yahoo have not confirmed if they continue to do this after 18 months if they do it's still an increase in time where our data is available and if they don't, there's something very sinister going on.