To that end, Microsoft has promised to make search-query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms. The company stated it also plans to “develop new user controls that will enhance privacy, such as letting people search and surf its sites without being associated with a personal and unique identifier used for behavioral ad targeting.”

Which is, of course, exactly the sort of opt-out control that Google has so far refused to permit. Now Google has made several positive adjustments to its data-retention policies recently–in fact, it shortened the lifetime of its cookies earlier this month. But you wouldn’t know it from the beginnings of this “industry dialogue” Microsoft and Ask.com have announced. Because Google wasn’t even asked to participate in the prediscussions that created it. “Google learned about this Microsoft/Ask initiative from reading about it in the press,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, told Search Engine Land. “We have publicly said that we’d support a process for further industry dialogue on online privacy issues.”

Omitting the industry leader from an effort to create “industry-wide standards” in online marketing and advertising does seem a ham-handed way to develop a common industry approach to privacy issues, doesn’t it? “An industry effort really should start on better terms,” said Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. “Ask, in particular, shouldn’t be playing this game. After being left out of prediscussions on things like nofollow or site maps, excluding Google and Yahoo perhaps might feel like sweet revenge, but privacy is too important for PR games.”

So it’s reassuring to learn that the company has agreed to cut the time for which it retains users’ personal search data to 18 months from 18 to 24 months. The move is a concession to the Article 29 Working Party, the European Commission’s advisory group on privacy protection, which last month expressed concern over Google’s plan to retain user data for up to two years (PDF). “After considering the Working Party’s concerns, we are announcing a new policy: to anonymize our search server logs after 18 months, rather than the previously established period of 18 to 24 months,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel explained. “We believe that we can still address our legitimate interests in security, innovation and antifraud efforts with this shorter period. However, we must point out that future data-retention laws may obligate us to raise the retention period to 24 months. We also firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests in security, innovation and antifraud efforts with any retention period shorter than 18 months.”

Google’s policy change, while certainly a step in the right direction, likely won’t be enough to sate privacy advocates who’ve in the past called for it to scrub user logs in 18 to 24 hours, not months. Still, it’s better than that of Yahoo and Microsoft, which have so far declined to disclose their data-retention policies at all. This begs the question: Why haven’t we heard anything about the Working Party’s letters to those two companies? Insufficient postage for airmail?