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December 11, 2007
AskEraser
It's the new new thing in personal privacy protection online, according to a story by Richard Waters in today's Financial Times.
I must confess that after reading the article, studying the page on Ask that explains the new feature and perusing the AskEraser FAQ, I haven't a clue as to whether it's an advance or not.
I'm hoping my non-TechnoDolt™ readers (Angela? Dan? clifyt? anyone?) will clear the air for all of us.
December 11, 2007 at 10:01 AM | Permalink
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Comments
What happens if I'm a venture capitalist researching the market before making a new investment? Better still, what if I'm looking for "prior art" before hiring a search firm for a client's "new" invention? The former could influence stock prices and the latter is just smart - it stands to save a client nearly $100k in search and patent app fees if the "invention" already exists or is an obvious improvement to an existing technology.
Both are examples of searches ought to be 100% non-disclosed. There are hundreds of other examples in Prof. Solove's law review article.
Posted by: 6.02*10^23 | Dec 11, 2007 8:37:39 PM
(The permanent URL for the abovementioned Machinist post is here.)
I mean, you're not doing anything wrong but you just don't like your picture being taken?
People don't often look at porn while they're in a bank, search for information on embarrassing illnesses, announce to other patrons that they'll be out of the house on holiday all next week...
I'm happy to learn that you've never searched for anything that you wouldn't be happy for the world to know about. Many of the rest of us, however, would prefer to preserve our privacy.
Next people will want anonymous library cards
You may not care about your government getting hold of information about what books you've borrowed, but I assure you that a lot of other people, definitely including most librarians, do.
For a brief scholarly discussion of the manifold defects of the seductively simple "nothing to hide" argument, I recommend GWU Law School Associate Professor Daniel J. Solove's paper on the subject, which you can download for free here.
Posted by: Daniel Rutter | Dec 11, 2007 6:21:00 PM
I'm not sure *why* you ('you' being 'anyone') care about your search engine caching your searches. I guess it's like caring that there are cameras in a bank, right? I mean, you're not doing anything wrong but you just don't like your picture being taken?
I'd say that if you're out on the 'net, then you can't be *too* interested in security etc because there's so much that we do completely insecurely.
Next people will want anonymous library cards or one-time-use-debit cards so they can't be tracked in any form.
Posted by: Maximillian | Dec 11, 2007 2:22:57 PM
AskEraser turns out to be all smoke and mirrors.
"Well, but there's an exception. Ask.com and Google are rivals, but they are also partners -- Google serves ads on Ask's site. To customize ads to people's searches, Ask.com passes your search queries on to Google. Thus even if you turn on AskEraser, your Ask.com search data may still be logged on Google's servers."
http://machinist.salon.com/
Back to plan "A" - anonymizer and virtual machine. Check my IP, Joe. Thanks to http://anonymouse.org I have a different IP with this post.
Posted by: 6.02*10^23 | Dec 11, 2007 2:03:01 PM
Hmm,
Given that the Ask.Com has received no "consideration" for this "promise" there is nothing to enforce. The "promise" could be considered "mere puffery" (this car was only driven to and from church by a little-old-lady) and the records could be provided upon service of a subpoena duces tecum.
There are a number of other ways to effect the desired result- with some substantial basis to believe that you have protected yourself - use an anonymizer (or, two) to hide your IP and create a virtual machine to host the browser and then trash the VM at the end of the session.
Joe, Safari has a "Private Browsing" setting that trashes the cache and cookies for the session - my friends in the family law field refer to that as "porn mode" - it is apparently a boon to randy teens and spouses alike.
Posted by: 6.02*10^23 | Dec 11, 2007 12:16:49 PM
By default, Ask.com saves your search history (well, the search history of the computer/IP address from which you access Ask.com, anyway). The only reason this is a good thing from the point of view of a user is that it lets you - or ought to let you, anyway - go back and see what you searched for yesterday or last week, when you found that thing, you know, with the articulated doodad, that you need now but can't remember what it was.
(Google has a similar feature.)
Ask.com also uses user search data for its search string suggestor feature, from which which horrible people like me have derived considerable entertainment.
Turn on the Eraser and your data isn't recorded any more, so it won't be usable for any of the above stuff, or leaked or stolen or sold or whatever. Well, not if they're telling the truth, anyway.
Retention of search data is a real privacy issue; the standard response that if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you've-got-nothing-to-fear (how could we ever not have realised that phrase wanted to be a disco anthem?) is moronic, since ordinary non-criminal individuals certainly do have many pieces of information they do not want to be public. There are many situations in which some of that information could be revealed by one's Web searches.
I'm still not entirely sure why anybody would actually bother to use Ask.com, though :-).
Posted by: Daniel Rutter | Dec 11, 2007 10:58:59 AM
