Yahoo said on Wednesday that it had decided to comply with concerns of privacy advocates and regulators - regarding the amount of time for keeping data about consumers - and would purge personally identifiable information related to user search queries after three months, from a prior standard of 13 months. However, the company is reserving the right to keep data for up to six months, in the case of fraud, security violations or legal matters.

As per the recommendation of the European Union, companies should keep data no more than six months, as an industry-wide standard. Of late, the companies have curtailed their retention programs, so that rules are not imposed on them. Google has already halved its time to nine months; and Microsoft has also said it will cut the time to six months if its rivals agree.

Yahoo's latest decision makes it the most privacy friendly of the major search engines, thereby putting pressure on rivals Google and Microsoft to match its new policy. The company is also planning to expand the scope of the data it is making anonymous - in addition to search log data, it will now include page and advertisement clicks and views.

Yahoo will erase from its records the last eight bits that make up an Internet Protocol address. It also will mask personal data from cookies, and delete logs of search terms that contain personal information like names, credit card numbers and addresses.

In the opinion of Anne Toth, the Yahoo vice president who oversees privacy, the new policy is an example of "responsible self-regulation." She said that the 90-day threshold serves as "a great differentiator" from the competition.