Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy

Senior staff attorney Chris Jay Hoofnagle commented on Ask.com’s new privacy feature in a New York Times article. The article, “Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy,” discusses how ask.com has added a new feature to its search engines that allows users to make their searches private. Ask.com claims that it erases search information if AskEraser is turned on. However, privacy experts doubt that this new feature will give a competitive edge to ask.com, as it only accounts for 4.7% of all searches in the United States.

“In some cases, companies have argued that they are required to keep records of search queries for some time to comply with laws in various countries.
“Those arguments are seriously undermined when their competitors erase data immediately,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior lawyer at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mr. Hoofnagle and other privacy advocates said they hoped AskEraser would pressure Google and others to offer a similar feature. A Google spokesman said the company takes privacy seriously but is not currently developing a service to immediately discard search queries.”

View Article