Ask and they shall not receive

Posted on | December 12, 2007 |

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There’s been a considerable amount of hype recently surrounding Ask.com’s new AskEraser, their privacy protection tool that enables users to:

“When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries.”

I thought I would check it out to weight in on it (it’s been so long since I’ve used Ask, I had to sign up again). You’ll notice AskEraser on the top right corner of the site, one click on that will reveal:

which gives you the option to turn the feature on to keep all you search history and data private. A quick click again on the top right section of the page will then turn it off.

So I’m a little baffled by the popularity of this news (one can only assume that it was a slow news day). I do understand that Google has come under fire for their privacy policy but users do have a couple of options, they’re just not as obvious. Maybe that’s the news. In Google, click on “Web History” and choose pause. The other option is to not log in.

Anyway, Ask.com is being applauded for this move. I’m not one of these people too concerned about my information but also agree that this is a nice little feature. Maybe it will do something to increase their 5% market share but I can’t see it. More importantly though, it may inspire Google to make some further changes on their end.