The controversy over Facebooks' Beacon app underlined once again the dangers; seemingly safe sites don't blink an eyelid at invading your privacy. At the heart of the problem: targeted advertising. Effective cooky erasors are what's needed.
The battle for customer clicks that result in buying action has only just gone underway in earnest. The tone might have been set as far as five years ago by Google's adSense, but the lack of significant competition has meant that apps blocking the ads have been slow to take of.
Now, increasing competition for Google type ads will hopefully raise the spectre on regulation and create blockers.
The online advertising game is largely determined by timing. Most successful ventures that currently shape the online ad landscape are revealing their plans only bit by bit, careful to play into the market. But of late, advertisers increasingly have to be aware of people's sentiments about privacy.
The privacy issue is under-reported and so far, it seems that advertisers brush past thorny aspects unpunished. That is why the emergence of tools that aims to safeguard your privacy is an important development in combating advertisers' encroachment onto personal space.
Ask.com recently launched a nifty little feature called AskEraser. It is one of the few tools out there dedicated solely to the privacy issue. When the Facebook Beacon drama broke out last month, there was virtually no reference to Ask.com's device.
Neither have other companies been quick to copy it. That is a shame, but it may take time. Regulators are slow to take a stand on privacy protection issues, and that simply means that a market for cookie erasors is not stimulated. I haven't checked, but who knows, a crowdsourcing platform might be busy constructing similar apps.
If Ask.com's market is ill defined as yet, perhaps it could play into people's sympathy and trust. Its device erases all your tracks on the internet. This way, advertisers will not get hold of them. It deletes your IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies, as well as the complete text of your search query. Catch is that this only occurs if you're on Ask.com territory. But I will have yet to see if there's something that is repulsive about that.
Once you have installed the erasor, the device operates over various Ask.com verticals including images, news, blogs, video, and maps & directions.
It is certainly worthwhile installing for the time being, whilst awaiting what measures regulators are taking to protect social networks users.
