Yahoo! Breaks a Privacy Commandment--Thou Shall Minimize Data Collection & Retention--with a Data Sharing Deal Update!

Data minimization is one of the core values in Fair Information Principles for Privacy.  Yahoo!s flip flop on its data retention practices reflects both the digital marketing anything goes "Big Data" collection era we confront, as well as its need to boost revenues from one of its few assets--the information collected from its users.  Just two years ago, Yahoo's Ann Toth declared that its decision to anonymize its user personal information after 90 days "set a new industry standard for protecting consumer privacy.  This policy represents Yahoo’s assessment of the minimum amount of time we need to retain data in order to respond to the needs of our business while deepening our trusted relationship with users.  We wanted to create a policy which we believe takes data retention off the table” for privacy campaigners and regulators."  Now they will hold data for 18 month, according to Ms. Toth's new post.  If Moses came down from the mountain today holding the Privacy 10 Commandments, Yahoo and other digital marketers would quickly chisel off the Data Retention principle.  [Btw, Yahoo's orginal decision to reduce data retention was largely in response to building pressure on the issue from EU privacy regulators].

Why?   Because Yahoo needs to offer major advertisers the opportunity to use consumer data via longer retention times.  Yahoo wants car, travel, financial and other companies to be able to take advantage of the longer time it takes a consumer to decide on a major purchase (esp. cross platform, inc. mobile).  It also likely wants to harvest the data for its Yahoo Consumer Direct and Yahoo Network Plus product that helps track online ads impact on real store sales.  This data can be used for predictive modeling for ad targeting as well.  Finally, one of Yahoo's only real assets is user data, given its inability to ever compete with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.   

Yahoo needs to be more transparent in why it's doing this.  We will ask the FTC to inquire and get some answers.

PS:  We also see that Yahoo has just signed a deal with global ad agency giant Omnicom giving them access to their storehouse of user data and ad exchange services.  Microsoft and AOL just made a similar giving our data to Omnicom deal.