by Forest

I did research on Ask Eraser, a part of the Ask.com search engine that disables the engine’s ability to gather personal info from users. Without Ask Eraser engaged the engine could place cookies (pieces of software that a website puts on your computer), find out your personal info such as your name, and phone number, address, age, IP address (the location, or “call number” of your computer on the internet) It could possibly even take info such as credit card number, social security number or bank account number.

This sort of information would go into your digital identity, the trail of ones and zeros you leave behind every day you use tech. It can be used to find out something as harmless as what you ate for lunch or something as malignant as the aid to a murder (don’t go nuts, the chances of that are about one million to one) but you need to be careful.

On most search engines every time you type something in and press enter it automatically records your IP address and what you’re searching for. This info is usually kept inside a database and not read by anyone, but if it’s there there’s always some risk of info leakage.

Unfortunately Ask Eraser comes at a price, the second article states that when you go to Ask.Com, Ask Eraser itself places session cookies (identifying “name tag” cookies that enable websites to remember you) to record your preference of having Ask Eraser on. With these cookies in effect it could also extract identifying information from your computer without your knowledge.

With that on the table it really comes down to you, pick your poison. Do you trust Ask.com in default or Ask Eraser mode, both? Nether? Both of them have the downside of putting your personal info at risk. When I first wrote my thesis I only saw one side of the argument that Ask Eraser helps to prevent internet crime. But as I did more research the size of the catch 22 really became apparent. I do not recommend Ask Eraser simply because it implements the very thing it supposedly targets. This can rightfully classify it’s creators as un-trustworthy hypocrites.

Sources:
http://lifehacker.com
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9836002-7.html