Ask.com Releases AskEraser, A New Privacy Switch
The search engine Ask.com is making a proactive move.
Ask.com will unveil on Tuesday a “privacy switch” that lets users completely erase their search queries and related data from the search engine’s servers.
The new feature, dubbed AskEraser, is believed to mark the first time that Internet users have been given control over whether their information is retained by a search engine. Company officials and privacy advocates hope the ” privacy switch” will pressure other Internet companies to follow suit.
“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,” said
Doug Leeds , senior vice president at Ask.com, a unit of IAC/InterActive Corp. (IACI). “We are giving users the ability themselves to take control of their privacy.”Ari Schwartz , deputy director of the public-policy group Center for Democracy and Technology, said he hoped AskEraser would force other search engines to respond. “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,” he said. But it wasn’t immediately clear whether AskEraser will reset the parameters of the ongoing debate over online privacy, given that usage of Ask.com continues to lag far behind that of its rivals. Ask.com accounted for just 2.9% of the U.S. search market in October behindGoogle Inc. More importantly, data that Ask.com erases will be first sent to(GOOG), Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX) AOL, according to research group Nielsen Online. , which recently signed a five-year contract to serve ads alongside Ask.com search results. is under no apparent obligation to erase any information it receives from Ask.com, even in cases in which the user switched on the AskEraser function.
The article continues. The New York Times poses the question, will privacy sell?
Ask.com is betting it will. The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private.
Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.
Ask, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp based in Oakland, hopes that the privacy protection will differentiate it from more prominent search engines like Google. The service will be conspicuously displayed on Ask.com’s main search page, as well as on the pages of the company’s specialized services for finding videos, images, news and blogs. Unlike typical online privacy controls that can be difficult for average users to find or modify, people will be able to turn AskEraser on or off with a single click.
“It works like a light switch,” said Doug Leeds, senior vice president for product management at Ask.com. Mr. Leeds said the service would be a selling point with consumers who were particularly alert about protecting their privacy.
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Some privacy experts doubt that concerns about privacy are significant enough to turn a feature like AskEraser into a major selling point for Ask.com. The search engine accounted for 4.7 percent of all searches conducted in the United States in October, according to comScore, which ranks Internet traffic. By comparison, Google accounted for 58.5 percent, Yahoo for 22.9 percent and Microsoft for 9.7 percent.
“My gut tells me that basically it is not going to be a competitive advantage,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, an independent research company “I think people will look at it and see it as a cool thing, and they may use it. But I don’t think it will be a market differentiator.”
Mr. Ponemon said many surveys showed that while about three in four Americans said they were concerned about privacy, their concern was not sufficient to make them change their behavior toward sharing personal information. About 8 percent of Americans were concerned enough about privacy to routinely take steps to protect it, the surveys showed.
“Privacy only becomes important to the average consumer when something blows up,” Mr. Ponemon said.
Of course, something has already blown up. Last year, AOL released the queries conducted by more than 650,000 Americans over three months to foster academic research. While the queries where associated only with a number, rather than a computer’s address, reporters for The New York Times and others were quickly able to identify some of the people who had done the queries. The queries released by AOL included searches for deeply private things like “depression and medical leave” and “fear that spouse contemplating cheating.”
The article continues discussing such privacy violations.