Introducing AskEraser
Ask.com has just unveiled a new feature – AskEraser. This tool is great news for privacy advocates like me. Users can simply click the “AskEraser” button on the Ask homepage, and Ask will delete any data it collected about them or their search queries in a matter of hours.
“Anywhere that you log into, anywhere where you put in personalized information, there should be a way – an easy way – to control how that information is used and retained. We are giving users the ability themselves to take control of their privacy,” said Doug Leeds, the senior vice president of Ask.
Although this is not about Google per se, this new development may have substantial effects on the search engine market as a whole. It’s not clear how much society as a whole values this ability to protect their privacy, but if it causes enough people switch to Ask, other search engines may be forced to adopt similar tools.
“As you start giving users more control on certain sites, we hope that sites pressure each other (to implement) privacy control as a competitive tool,” said Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Ask makes up only 2.9% of the
U.S. search engine market, however, lagging behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. Another problem is that data from Ask users gets sent to Google so that Google can serve ads alongside Ask’s search results. Google can (and probably does) store this data indefinitely, even if users have enabled AskEraser.
When a user turns on AskEraser, it will remain on for two years, and information about all of the user’s future activities on Ask will be deleted. In order to do this, Ask uses one cookie, but the only content of the cookie is the date and time the user enabled AskEraser. Although this is still an “opt-out” system, meaning that users’ data is collected by default and they must decide that they want privacy in order to be granted it, it is quite an improvement over most search engines’ policies. It is extremely easy to turn on AskEraser. People who have never heard of it are likely to notice the text link displayed at the top of the Ask home page, and then click to find out what it is. By creating the AskEraser tool, Ask has demonstrated that they respect users’ preferences when it comes to privacy. I hope such tools become the norm among search engines.
Source:
Morrison, Scott. “Ask.com Adds Privacy Tool To Let Users Erase Search Data.” Wall Street Journal. 10 Dec. 2007
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119738061204320863.html?mod=googlenews_wsj>.