Ask.com Targets The Coveted Paranoid Demographic

from the ask-jeeves dept

Ask.com is seeking to differentiate itself from its more popular competitors by adding a new feature called AskEraser that will prevent Ask from retaining personal information about its users. A prominent link on the front page will allow users to turn AskEraser on and off. When it's set to "on," Ask will automatically discard the information it normally collects in order to provide users with personalized service.It's great to see Ask focusing attention on search engine privacy, and giving users more choices is rarely a bad thing, but I can't help feel like this is more a marketing gimmick than a serious privacy initiative. In the first place, as the Times article points out, Ask will still be feeding query information to Google, which has not promised to respect the user's AskEraser setting. This would seem to limit the usefulness of the service for users who don't want their activities tracked or recorded. But the more serious flaw, it seems to me, is that it forces the user into making an all-or-nothing choice between privacy on the one hand a personalization on the other. I doubt very many users want either perfect anonymity with no personalization, or compete personalization with no privacy. Rather, most users want a search engine that strikes a reasonable balance by collecting the minimum amount of information necessary to provide useful personalization services and handling that data in sensible ways that enhance user privacy. Rather than an all-or-nothing choice between functionality or privacy, search engines should make clear to users the trade-offs they face and let them choose which personalization features they want to enable. In addition, there are lots of ways search engines can enhance privacy without any significant reduction in functionality. For example, earlier this year Google announced that they would start anonymizing their logs after 18 months, a small but sensible way to protect customer privacy. More steps like that would enhance the privacy of all users, not just those who are privacy-conscious enough to click the AskEraser link.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Search Engines Compete On Accuracy, Privacy Policies

from the who-is-the-private-ist? dept

With Google taking some hits over its data retention practices, its competitors are hoping that they can use the privacy issue to their advantage. Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask have all updated or clarified their policies to give users more control over what data is kept and for how long. It's great to see that the search engines are responsive on this issue, but it's hard to imagine that these moves will have a big effect on the competitive landscape. Consumers express a preference for better privacy when asked about it in studies and surveys, but they often fail to put these preferences into practice when choosing products. Of course, even if users don't switch from one site to another, the net effect of this oneupmanship should result in better privacy, if these companies stick to their word.

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Microsoft Acknowledges That There Are Other Search Engines Out There, Sort Of

from the ad-me dept

Last month, a much-hyped partnership between Salesforce.com and Google turned out to be a real snoozer, when it was revealed that the tie-up would simply offer Salesforce.com customers a better way to manage their AdWords campaigns. One aspect of the deal that was troubling was that it belied the myth that all these various web services are so easily mashed up. After all, why should Salesforce.com have to sign a deal with Google to offer AdWords management? Ideally, any company would be able to offer this functionality. Today, Microsoft announced enhancements to its own AdManager service, which allows users to manage advertising campaigns on Microsoft's search. Now, however, customers can buy ads for Live search and for Ask.com. It's really great that Microsoft is taking this big tent approach, acknowledging that there are other search engines out there that customers would like to buy ads on, but it's still missing a couple -- Google and Yahoo come to mind. Ultimately, if it wants AdManager to be a valuable service, then it should allow customers to manage as many different campaigns as they want, through any search engine. This piecemeal approach, allowing customers to buy ads on different Microsoft-approved sites, isn't going to get the company very far in its software plus services strategy.

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