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Ask First Major Search Engine to Adopt No-Snoop Policy
Ask has announced the forthcoming launch of “Ask Eraser” which will let you erase your search history, a feature scheduled for end of the year that “will offer its searchers unmatched control over their privacy when searching for information on the Web” as they put it in their press release.
And it gets even better:
With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search history will not be retained by Ask. com. Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once selected, searchers’ privacy settings will be clearly indicated on search results pages so they always know the privacy status of their searches.
Moreover, they are promising to implement a new data retentioin policy that will “completely disassociate search history from a user’s IP address or cookie information after 18 months”.
All this is to be taken with grain of salt or two, however. As Anick Jesdanunin points out in a piece titled “When asked, Ask to stop data retention”:
The new controls won’t guarantee user anonymity, however. As Ask’s advertising partner, Google would receive and could retain the data in question. Search terms also appear in the Web address sent to Ask, and Internet service providers could retain that.
But Leeds [Ask’s vice president of product management; fN] said Ask would review contracts with Google and other third parties to limit what they could do with the information, and the company hoped the move would pressure rivals to also adopt tighter privacy controls.
You’ll find an in depth analysis of the technical issues involved in Danny Sullivan’s piece “Ask.com To Launch AskEraser To Erase Search History & New Data Retention Policy”.
Hopefully, this heralds a new round of competition in capturing users’ hearts by addressing ever growing concerns about the engines’ data mining practices.
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[Keywords: search engines, Ask, privacy, data retention, data mining ]
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