Ask.com Eraser (Privacy) vs. Google

Ask.com’s move is brilliant from a marketing standpoint

Lately, it seems Google has turned to the dark side on several levels. If you’re politically savvy, you know there is a serious problem with government invading our private lives. Now, the CEO of Ask.com is fighting back.

Ask.com is serious about privacy. We are committed to meeting and exceeding emerging privacy trends in the search industry. Not only will we proactively delete the search activity of all Ask.com users from our servers after 18 months, but we also offer AskEraser, which, when enabled, deletes your search activity within hours.

Your privacy on Ask.com

At Ask.com, we believe that you as a user should have the power to control the usage of your search history. When enabled, AskEraser will completely delete your search queries and data from Ask.com servers, including: your IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies, as well as the complete text of your search query–all within a matter of hours.

Read more about Ask.com’s new privacy policy and features

I first heard about this strategy over the summer and my initial thoughts were that I’d dump Google in a heartbeat if Ask.com protects people from invasions of privacy. Of course, everyone’s hope is that Google will implement a similar feature. The problem with that is that they may be in too deep. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re already giving the government tons of user data or profiting off of user’s private information in much the same way Face Book does.

Could net nerds put the heat on Google? Any chance of a revolution that would turn the tables and save our future from unwarranted invasions of our privacy? I won’t hold my breath, but if there was enough interest in such a movement, I’d gladly help lead the way.

Fred Soto is an Attorney and Entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley.
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