Important Privacy Announcement

I  wanted to make you aware of a very important announcement we made earlier today. As you know, Trustworthy Computing is all about Security,  Reliability and Business Practices. Our house has a fourth pillar -  Privacy - which we view as extremely  important, not only in terms of the way we manage our customers’ data, but more broadly in the way we earn and keep our customers’ trust.

You may have heard  about the European Union Article 29 Working Party, which issued a statement in April to search providers concerning   search anonymization policies. A major part of their focus  is the length of time search companies store customer data. The Article 29 Working Party’s view is that this should be no more than six months. 

Earlier today we announced that we support the Article 29 Working Party’s call for a common industry standard for search data anonymization methods and timeframes to help protect users’ privacy. We also said that whilst the timeframe is important, more important still is the adoption of strong data anonymization methods. I am glad we made this commitment and I hope that others will follow our lead and support the standard laid down by the Article 29 Working Party. To truly protect users’ privacy, it is imperative that all search companies adopt the same standard.

If you want to read more, read Peter Cullen’s (our Chief Privacy Strategist) blog post: Microsoft Supports Strong Industry Search Data Anonymization Standards

Roger

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2008
  Hi, This is the first time i came to your blog and i must say i like it alot! Specially the articles. I would like to suggest you to add your articles to www.add-article.info . It's a site where people go to find articles. So i suggest you go there and register. Once you register, you can add descriptions of your articles in less than 30 seconds. By doing that, you will recieve two links to your blog and a picture of your blog next to the description. That way people will find your blog and you will get many new visitors. Do not forget to vote for your articles after you add them to that site, that way you will be on the first site for a long time (tell others to vote too). Well anyhow, hope to see you there soon :-) , if not, good luck with your articles and keep up with good work. Cheers, Matt

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2008
  Security and Privacy are two seperated, independent ICT Dimensions. Security is defined as the amount of uncertainty about the information content not allowed individuals have regarding secured information. Privacy is defined as the amount of uncertainty not allowed individuals have about regarding the identity of involved persons (the amout of anonymity). A low-cost PC-based system which supports unconditional provable security and optionally privacy can be found on the link http://www.swissitpro.ch when you search for the keyword "quantum".

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2008
  The comment has been removed