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Will Privacy Sell?

Posted by Zonk on from the one-of-the-few-things dept.

DeeQ writes "Ask.com is betting that it will. The search engine is working on a service called AskEraser that will attempt to obscure the searches a user enters into the site. 'Some privacy experts doubt that concerns about privacy are significant enough to turn a feature like AskEraser into a major selling point for Ask.com. The search engine accounted for 4.7 percent of all searches conducted in the United States in October, according to comScore, which ranks Internet traffic. By comparison, Google accounted for 58.5 percent, Yahoo for 22.9 percent and Microsoft for 9.7 percent.'" We first discussed this project back in July.

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Sure by Dan+East · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure it will. I was just reading Google News, and saw this story as the top Sci/Tech headline, and thought "Hey, I forgot about ask.com. Maybe I'll run a few searches through them and see how it goes."

    So whether or not the new privacy policy attracts people directly, the publicity will bring them hits for sure. Maybe even a few converts.

    Dan East

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  2. I'd rather have a decent privacy law by schwaang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because in most situations in life you can't apply market pressure in favor of privacy. Your data is being sold to data brokers like Choice Point and Axciom, and after that you don't know who looks at it, why, or when.

  3. Privacy? No way. by dippitydoo · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I'm not sure that anything could be private anymore. Sure, you use Ask.com to stay Private, while your ISP will probably allow the government to look at it anyways. Privacy? I see no privacy here, Move along.

  4. Add yourself to Terrorit List by natoochtoniket · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There really is a good reason to offer an anonymous search tool. Anyone who uses it is automatically suspect. Doesn't matter what you used it for. The fact that you did use it, at all, makes you a suspect. If we can convince all of our domestic terrorists to register themselves by using this tool, we can solve the terrorism problem.

    Of course, in a perfect world, the crooked politicians will also use the same tool. It would take some serious effort to separate the politicians from the regular terrorists. But, just perhaps, we could solve both problems at once.

    ;-)