Ask rolls out search privacy tool Search engine Ask has launched a feature that it hopes will prove a selling point for consumers concerned about their online privacy. AskEraser allows users to immediately delete search queries stored on Ask’s servers, in contrast to rivals such as Google, which stores data for 18 months. How personal data is used is becoming more of an issue as people live more of their lives via search engines. Some are concerned about possible deals between search engines and ad firms. In America consumer advocacy groups have expressed doubts about a proposed merger between Google and ad-serving company DoubleClick, which is currently being reviewed by US regulators. Jumping on the privacy bandwagon, Ask is offering users the chance to take charge of what happens with their search history. An AskEraser link will feature prominently on the Ask.com homepage and, when enabled by the user, will delete all future search queries and associated cookie information from its servers. The information it destroys includes IP address, user ID and session ID along with the complete text of a query. But some critics have pointed out that it doesn’t entirely erase all information, as search queries relating to advertisements supplied by Google will continue to be passed to the search rival. Other search engines are attempting to quell concerns about privacy and most operate polices which mean search histories are deleted between a year and 18 months after they were made. But some consumers are getting twitchy about how their data is shared, following some high-profile cases. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social networking site Facebook, had to make changes to a new advertising system after more than 50,000 users complained about it. Called Beacon, the system is designed to track web shopping on partner sites outside Facebook with the intention of providing targeted adverts to the social network based on purchases. After complaints the site was invading privacy, Facebook changed Beacon from an opt-out system to opt in. Zuckerberg has said users can now switch off Beacon completely. Despite these cases not everyone is convinced that privacy is a big enough winner for users to desert their favored search engine for Ask. Surveys conducted in the US seem to bear this out. While a majority of Americans say they are concerned about their online privacy, only a tiny percentage are actually prepared to take steps to protect it. Yahoo believes that its current privacy policy is sufficient. Google said it had no plans to implement such a tool. According to Internet measurement firm comScore, Ask accounted for 4.7% of US searches during October. Google took the lion’s share with 58.5%, with Yahoo accounting for 22.9% and Microsoft for 9.7%.

Mobile Linux group releases first specification While Google’s Linux mobile phone platform, Android, has been stealing the spotlight, another longer-standing mobile Linux group is also moving ahead. The Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), comprised of companies including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista and Access, completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification. The group released half of the specification in June and has now added components including APIs (application programming interfaces) for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging and presence functions, as well as new user interface components. The specification covers all the key components for building a feature phone or a smart phone but is not meant to be a specification for a complete phone stack, said Bill Weinberg, general manager for LiPS. The idea is to allow developers to create applications that will work on all phones that use the LiPS specification. The telephony API is a particularly important feature of the specification because it allows developers to create applications around the voice telephony functionality of the device, he said. That’s a capability developers won’t have with some other phone platforms like Apple’s iPhone, which isn’t expected to support development around telephony, he said. LiPS expects to see multiple implementations of the standard in commercial phones, possibly quite soon, he said. In the next six months, the group should release some revisions to the specification based on real world experience. Beyond that, LiPS should begin releasing additional enabling technologies to the specification, he said. The market greeted the launch of LiPS in 2005 with some fanfare, but nothing like the excitement around Google’s recent announcement of Android. LiPS is different from the Open Handset Alliance, the group supporting Google’s Android, because it is a specification that allows users to create different interoperable implementations while Android is itself one implementation of Linux, Weinberg said that the basic notion of what OHA and Android put forth is an implementation of a phone stack that is Java-based and a given implementation. If that implementation is broadly accepted and devices are built on it, it could constitute a de facto standard. The various mobile Linux groups are essentially after the same thing, he said. “I’d say [LiPS] and OHA and for that matter LiMo are all attempting to unify what some people say is a fragmented market, but we’re going about it in different fashions,” Weinberg said. LiMo is a group founded by Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Samsung and others to build a mobile Linux platform. Weinberg admitted that the groups are competitive in at least one sense: They’re all competing for resources to work on their respective projects.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 due by year end Mozilla Corp. said developers have handed off the second beta of Firefox 3.0 to internal testing, and will ship the next preview of the open-source browser before the end of the year. The tentative release date for Beta 2 has been set for Dec. 21, said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s interface designer, in a posting to a company blog. Mozilla dropped Beta 1 on users Nov. 20; a day later, Mike Schroepfer, the company’s vice president of engineering, said the goal was to get another beta out the door before 2007 ended. Some bugs present in Beta 1, however, have not been fixed in the newest preview, according to messages on the mozilla.dev.planning forum. Last Friday, after the final five bugs that had held up Beta 2’s progress were resolved, Schroepfer gave the green light, even though others proposed holding the code until three more problems were fixed. None of the three bugs had been marked as fixed in Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug tracking database and management tool, but at least two other patches squeezed in under the deadline. Mozilla will also take steps similar to ones put in place last month if bloggers or reporters link to the server hosting the “nightly builds,” code that’s updated daily and used primarily by developers and testers. A posting to Digg.com before Beta 1 was ready prompted Mozilla to redirect users to an explanatory page to keep the nightly server online.