AskEraser Offers Privacy at the Expense of Features
Ask.com has finally released its AskEraser feature, announced earlier this year, which allows users to stop Ask from collecting invasive personal data.
With AskEraser enabled Ask will stop collecting and storing personal information, however, there’s a significant tradeoff — you’ll lose personalization features like preferred domain, custom skins and the MyStuff personal bookmarking features.
While AskEraser is a laudable effort, and clearly Ask is hoping privacy controls will help drive some more traffic to the site, offering privacy at the expense of features highlights exactly why most users aren’t more serious about their online privacy. Yet.
Couple that with the fact that Ask is a distant fourth place in search engine traffic, with roughly 4.5% of the U.S. market, and you have a recipe for, well, nothing.
Typically search engines store information like your IP address, User ID and Session ID in cookies which stick around for about 18 months (Yahoo 13 months), which means, as many discovered when AOL released some supposedly anonymous data which was then traced back to the people who entered it, your online search habits are an open book.
Privacy advocates have been after search engines for some time, arguing that they need to offer a means to control the data collected about you. The problem is that without that data the personalized features — a heavy draw for many users — disappear and it’s a lot easier to notice lost features than it is to notice something rather intangible like whether or not personal data is being collected.
Another problem with Ask’s stab at privacy controls is that the Google ads served on Ask results pages are still retaining personal data as per Google’s 18 month policy, so even though Ask might not know what you searched for, Google will.
For those really concerned about privacy, enough so that they’re willing to forgo features to hang on to some degree of anonymity, AskEraser is a great feature, assuming you’re an Ask.com user.
While its nice to see a company of Ask’s size get serious about offering privacy controls, so far the tradeoff in features is significant enough that the average user, who hasn’t yet felt the sting of personal data coming back around to bite, probably isn’t going to see the benefit.
[via The New York Times]
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