Ask.com Adds Privacy Tool To Let Users Erase Search Data

SAN FRANCISCO -- Ask.com unveiled Tuesday a "privacy switch" that lets users completely erase their search queries and related data from the search engine's servers.

The new feature, dubbed AskEraser, gives users control over whether their information is retained by the search engine. Company officials and privacy advocates hope the "privacy switch" will pressure other Internet companies to follow suit.

"Anywhere that you log into, anywhere where you put in personalized information, there should be a way - an easy way - to control how that information is used and retained," said Doug Leeds, senior vice president at Ask.com, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp. "We are giving users the ability themselves to take control of their privacy."

Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the public-policy group Center for Democracy and Technology, said he hoped AskEraser would force other search engines to respond. "As you start giving users more control on certain sites, we hope that sites pressure each other (to implement) privacy control as a competitive tool," he said.

But it wasn't immediately clear whether AskEraser will reset the parameters of the ongoing debate over online privacy, given that usage of Ask.com continues to lag far behind that of its rivals. Ask.com accounted for just 2.9% of the U.S. search market in October behind Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, according to research group Nielsen Online.

More importantly, data that Ask.com erases will be first sent to Google, which recently signed a five-year contract to serve ads alongside Ask.com search results. Google is under no apparent obligation to erase any information it receives from Ask.com, even in cases in which the user switched on the AskEraser function.

Mr. Leeds acknowledged the discrepancy, but added that his company was "inviting" other search engines to follow suit. "I do see it as a competitive tool right now, but it doesn't need to be if other search engines do this as well," he said.

Ask.com's privacy switch comes amid growing concerns that search groups such as Google and social networks like Facebook Inc. are working to develop innovative - and to some, intrusive - advertising systems that can target consumers based on personal data and their online activities.

Public outcry over Facebook's recently introduced word-of-mouth advertising system, known as Beacon, forced the social network to give users more control over how their online activities were shared with other people.

Google and Ask.com earlier this year committed to making anonymous their search logs after 18 months, but AskEraser goes one step further by allow users to completely delete all future search queries and related information from Ask.com servers, including the IP address, user ID, session ID, and the complete text of their queries.

Internet companies retain search data to improve the quality of their search engines, to protect against click fraud and to help display targeted content and advertising. Erasing people's search data would make it more difficult for Internet companies to compile detailed user profiles that enable them to target ads.

Mr. Leeds said Ask.com's new tool was prompted by a small but vocal group of users and privacy advocates who are concerned that Internet giants are compiling huge databases of people's personal information and search queries, which typically reflect their personalities, financial situations and interests.

"We are not at all deaf to the chorus of users, privacy groups and government officials who see this as an important issue," he said.

Ask.com refused to speculate about the percentage of users it thought would use the eraser function, but Leeds referred to those people as a "small subset" of the Internet population. He argued that Internet users will become much more comfortable with behavioral targeting if they don't see it as an intrusive threat to their privacy.

"It is much more palatable to consumers to be behaviorally targeted if they have the ability to turn that feature off," he said.

Mr. Leeds said he expected most people to disable AskEraser most of the time because Ask.com's personalized features - such as the ability to save search results, create photo albums, and write personal blogs - won't work when the privacy feature is enabled.

Ask.com said the technology, which was developed in-house, will be immediately available to users in the U.S. and the U.K. and will be rolled out globally in 2008.