Microsoft curtails how long it stores Web searches

Microsoft plans to store customer search data separately from data tied to people, e-mail addresses or phone numbers and take steps to assure no unauthorized correlation of these types of data can be made. It also will permanently remove “cookie” user identification data, Web address? or other identifiers. “Microsoft is going to do a more thorough scrub of customer data once it is too old,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University who served as U.S. privacy czar in the 1990s. “Previously, the practice was to do a partial scrub.”