With the Internet increasingly appearing to be a “big brother,” that knows your search habits, frequented sites and preferences, many Web surfers are demanding greater privacy online. Ask.com, the former “Ask Jeeves” search engine, has recently announced that it will go to greater links to protect users privacy, including the development of a new feature called the “AskEraser” which allows users to delete their search activity information permanently from the company’s server.
The feature works by eliminating all “cookies” on the user’s computer that are associated with the ask.com site, and by sending a query to the company’s server which will delete all previous search-related information gathered for the user.
The move is seen by Web analyst as a way of increasing user privacy, and dispelling fears that many Web surfers have about the growing amount of information online companies collect pertaining to their web-surfing habits. The AskEraser service is free, and deletion of an individual’s associated data takes place in only a few hours.
Online privacy advocates have been railing against the use of “cookies” and other information gathering applications employed by many of the biggest names online. Google, for example, collects an enormous amount of information about its users, and keeps this data available for users to see under their “Google History” page.
And although Google allows users to delete items from their search history, the company does not permanently delete this information from its servers. Amazon.com also uses advanced software cookies to collect data from users, though in Amazon’s case, the user is not presented with an option to alter or delete their prior history on the site.
In fact, remembering user’s preferences and previous search history on their site is a feature which Amazon.com boasts about. It allows the company to show an individual special sales and items that they are likely to be interested in, based on their prior viewing experience.
And although this type of collected search data can be convenient in some cases, it also raises very real privacy concerns, especially at a time when cybercrime and identity theft are rampant. Users are rightly concerned that many online companies know too much about their personal shopping and search history, and perhaps even other, more personal information that could leave them vulnerable to online scams.
In light of the growing discontent over a seeming lack of privacy online, Ask.com’s new “eraser” feature seems like a step in the right direction. Now if we can just get Google, Amazon, eBay, iTunes and other big names online to follow suit, we’ll really be getting somewhere.
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