Online Privacy - Does anyone care?
Posted on December 11, 2007 by Chris DeBrusk
Ask.com is making headlines today with a new feature they’ve launched called AskEraser. Essentially if you want, any search you make on Ask.com can be made anonymous and they won’t store a record of it anywhere on the Ask servers.
Not necessarily new functionality - there are many sites that will allow you to mask your web browsing behind a proxy server (just ask all those politically sensitive bloggers in China how it works), this is the first time that a major search engine has said they won’t retain any information that can be tied to a specific searcher.
But there are some caveats. For one, they cannot guarantee that some of that information isn’t leaked to the partners who provide their ads (Google among them) and of course they are likely still all that rich search data together and using it to drive their own advertising engines. So call it search privacy light.
Still, it is an interesting ploy to stand out in the search space and as Facebook found out over the last few weeks, if you visibly show your users how much you happen to know about them (or can find out) they are going to scream.
Question is, does anyone care about online privacy unless it hits them in the face?
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