Blekko Tightens Privacy Options, Will Keep User Data Only 48 Hours

As part of a series of updates to its user and search privacy options, Blekko says it will hold on to personal data for only 48 hours — substantially less than major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Blekko, like other search engines, creates a record of visits that typically includes a searcher’s IP address, location, browser, language, the date and time of the visit and similar information. Beginning today, Blekko says it will delete that personal search information within 48 hours. And if you’re logged in to your Blekko account while searching, Blekko says it won’t keep a record of what you search for.

Yahoo recently made the surprising announcement that it would store data for 18 months, substantially longer than its previous 90-day retention policy. In 2008, Google announced that it would anonymize IP addresses after nine months. Bing currently retains search data for six months.

There are search engines that retain personal data less than Blekko’s 48 hours; actually, it would be more precise to say that they don’t even collect personal data in the first place. Both Duck Duck Go and Startpage (formerly IxQuick) have a policy of not collecting personal information from searchers.

Blekko also made a pair of other privacy-related announcements today:

First, “HTTPS Preferred” is a system that will automatically send searchers to secure, HTTPS websites (if available) when a searcher clicks a link in Blekko’s search results. Second, “No Ads” and “SuperPrivacy” are new privacy settings that allow users to search without ads and limit Blekko’s logging of search queries.