Ask anonymises search history
28 Mar 2008 | 17:23 GMT
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IN WHAT SEEMS LIKE a desperate bid to get someone out there to notice them, search engine Ask has become the first ‘major’ search engine to launch a new tool allowing people to perform anonymous Web searches.
The new service has been dubbed the AskEraser, and it lets surfers play around with their privacy settings to ensure that Ask won’t keep hold of their search history if users don’t want them to. The service will be launched in the UK and the US by the end of 2008, after which it will become available globally in 2009.
Ask will ask users whether they would like to search secretly or openly, and then for those who don’t choose the anonymous option, the little search engine will keep their data for up to 18 months before disassociating the user’s IP address and cookie information from their search history. Just in case the user fails to remember whether or not they told the search engine to forget their search for “how to dissolve a body in acid”, Ask will show a user their privacy settings every time they pull up search results.
Ask’s head of development, Doug Leeds, told CNET that he reckons " There will be no way for us to receive an IP address from a governmental agency and figure out what searches were done by that IP address." Useful information for anyone planning illegal activity then.
Search engine history has been a touchy subject in the past few years, with privacy concerns not helped much by incidents such as AOL mistakenly exposing the search history of over 650,000 of its users last August.
Google, the Vole and Yahoo have all pledged to upgrade their privacy levels with regards to Internet search history, but, apart from Ask, Google is the only other search engine taking any steps in the direction so far. Earlier this month, Google announced plans to begin anonymising the last eight bits of users’ IP addresses, unless it had been legally ordered not to. Also, at the beginning of this week, the search engine giant revealed that instead of setting web search cookie to expire in 2038, it would expire them after only two years.
Still, if you want to get away with murder anonymously, it’s probably best to use Ask. µ
L’Inq
CNET
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