When Internet giants team up, civil-liberties advocates tend to worry that their consolidated power will end up hurting the privacy of average users.
An agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo to work together on Web search is no different. But at least one expert thinks it could re-energize a three-year trend that has delivered to consumers more privacy protections around the search data Internet companies store.
Jules Polonetsky, director of the think tank Future Privacy Forum and formerly chief privacy officer at AOL and DoubleClick, thinks the tie-up could restart competition among the big search providers for bragging rights to who has the best practices.
Read more in The New York Times.