BERLIN — Bowing to pressure in Europe, Microsoft said Tuesday that it would redesign the worldwide operation of its online search engine, Bing, to eliminate all data collected on users after six months.
John Vassallo, a Microsoft vice president and associate general counsel, said the company would introduce the changes over the next 18 months, aiming to satisfy a European advisory group that had been critical of how search engines collect and retain data on individuals for advertising purposes.
The concession, relatively painless for Microsoft given its tiny share of the global search market — just 3 percent — is yet another example of a U.S. technology giant’s changing its way of doing business to suit stricter European concepts of antitrust and privacy law.
The European Commission in December dropped an antitrust case against Microsoft after the software maker took the unprecedented step of agreeing to distribute the browsers of its competitors through its Windows operating system.
Unlike the agreement on browsers, which will be confined to consumers in Europe, Microsoft’s decision to redesign Bing will affect users around the world, including in the United States.
Hendrik Speck, a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Kaiserslautern, Germany, said Microsoft’s decision to follow E.U. guidelines would probably be followed by Google and Yahoo, because consumers were increasingly concerned about online privacy amid widespread data theft and rising use of social networks.
“I think it is only a matter of time before Google also decides to change its own procedures, perhaps making them even more strict than Microsoft’s,” Mr. Speck said. “Google and other engines are starting to realize that consumers around the world are placing an increasing value on privacy and that can have business consequences.”
Europe is the world’s largest market for Internet searches, accounting for 32 percent of online queries, according to Comscore. The Asia-Pacific region had 31 percent of searches and North America 22 percent, according a Comscore report in July. Google has a 67 percent share of the global search market, according to Comscore, but a more than 80 percent share in Europe, where Microsoft has just 2 percent of the market.
In 2008, a panel of national privacy regulators from each European Union country asked Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to eliminate all online query data, like a computer’s unique identification number, location and the text typed into search fields, after six months.
The panel, known as the Article 29 Working Group, held a hearing with representatives of the search engine companies last February, and has given each until the end of January to respond.
Like other search engines, Microsoft had been keeping user data for more than 18 months. Last year, it changed its policy to make an individual’s I.P. address anonymous after six months.
So far, only Microsoft has agreed to comply fully with the panel’s request.
In a statement, Google gave no indication it would accept the E.U.’s demands. The company’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, reaffirmed Google’s policy of making user data anonymous after nine months, saying it struck the proper balance between ensuring user privacy and refining the functioning of its leading search engine.
“Data from our search queries represents a crucial arm in our battle to protect the security of our services against hacks and fraud,” Mr. Fleischer said. “It also represents a critical element allowing us to help users by innovating and improving the quality of our searches.”
Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, could not be immediately reached for comment.
While the Article 29 group is only an advisory body at the E.U. level, its members are the ranking privacy regulators from the 27 countries. They hold the power to levy fines nationally or even imprison violators. So far, however, no country has moved to impose sanctions on the companies over the issue.
But after the ratification last year of the E.U.’s Lisbon Treaty, which redistributed some of the decision-making power within the European Union, the European Commission will gain the ability to initiate E.U.-wide privacy regulations.
Mr. Vassallo, the Microsoft executive, said his company’s decision to conform to European requests on data retention was meant to avert the possibility of new regulation.
“It is possible that the European Union will take a position to regulate this one way or the other,” Mr. Vassallo said. “That would need a high level of responsibility from industry.”
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