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Privacy-Wary Searchers, Ask(.com) And Ye Shall Receive InternetNews.com. Ask.com Flips the Privacy Switch eWeek. Wired News - Slashdot all 297 news articles
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Ask.com said today that it has implemented a new privacy-enhancing feature in its search engine that will enable users to anonymize their queries.
Clicking the "AskEraser" button in the top right corner of the page will automatically delete related cookie information from its servers, including user and session ID's, IP addresses and search text.
Ask, a division of Internet conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, is the first of the major search companies to provide its users with a mechanism for automatically deleting their queries. Ask said that the deletion will generally take place within hours.
Turning the feature on will erase all the cookies created through most of Ask's search segments, such as news, blogs and images, unless the user selects otherwise.
In order for AskEraser to work, users must have cookies enabled in their browser. One cookie, named "askeraser" and created inside the ask.com domain, provides Ask's servers with a continuous reminder that the user has turned the feature on. It is preset to expire after 24 months; after that, users must turn AskEraser on again.
AskEraser is available beginning today for users in the United States and the United Kingdom. Ask plans a global launch for sometime next year.
The product of a fevered four-month in-house development effort, AskEraser comes in response to the growing privacy concerns among Internet users, according to Ask spokesman Nicholas Graham.
"We're raising the bar and setting a standard that we hope the rest of the industry will follow," Graham told Stories of Arda - Lord of the Rings Fan-Fiction Archive::
I shall have to press you into service as an illustrator for my book! Give my love to all and say that I shall be along soon to see how youre faring
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bible-prophecy-2000 : Messages : 428-458 of 641::
Continue, same verse, and at that time thy people shall be delivered [from receive JESUS with all of your heart, just open your heart, and pray, ask the
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InternetNews.com. "We know this is the first product of its kind; we hope it's not the last."
Given Ask's marginal position in the market, it remains to be seen whether the move will spur the larger search engines to follow suit.
Ask garnered just under 5 percent of overall search traffic during October, ranking it fourth in that category behind Google, Yahoo and MSN, according to online research firm Hitwise. In the same month, Google delivered nearly 65 percent of all search results.
More troubling to some privacy advocates, however, is the $3.5 billion deal that Google signed with Ask to place search ads on the smaller search engine's results pages.
Through that agreement, Google could still receive search data from Ask users who turned on AskEraser. Graham said that Ask has been open and transparent about its relationship with Google, and has had serious discussions with the search leader regarding privacy.
But at the end of the day, Ask said it has no control over what its partners do with the data they collect on their servers.
The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a consumer advocacy group that has been rattling its saber over advertisers' entrée into the social Web, pointed out that AskEraser won't affect the privacy policies of Google, Ask.com's advertisers and other third-party stakeholders.
Particularly troubling for CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester is this excerpt from Ask's revised privacy policy concerning its partners:
"These third-party companies have their own policies as to record keeping and data retention. Even if AskEraser is enabled, your search activity will not automatically be deleted from the servers of these third-party companies."
For Chester, AskEraser represents little more than a good start. In an e-mail to InternetNews.com, he wrote that while he applauded Ask's move, "there are glaring problems that underscore why the U.S. requires a single national policy to protect all of our digital information."
Chester also dismissed the notion that Ask's announcement proves that the search players are self-policing to address users' privacy concerns. Ask, on the other hand, claims this is exactly what it has done.
"We have shown that the marketplace can provide meaningful solutions to the problem of privacy," Graham said.
Absent the sweeping government regulation that Chester is calling for, the answer will have to wait until Google, Yahoo and Microsoft decide if there is enough of a competitive advantage to be gained in launching a tool like AskEraser that they follow suit.
Meantime, the loosely regulated search-engine industry this year has delivered some encouraging signs for privacy-wary Internet users. AskEraser, for instance, follows Ask's announcement earlier this year that it would disassociate user ID and IP address from search terms after 18 months.
Google and Microsoft have both implemented similar policies to anonymize search data after 18 months; Yahoo only waits 13 months.
To some extent, those moves came in response to the outcry over AOL's accidental release of the search terms of 659,000 Americans' search queries last year.
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