CNET just put up the Big Five’s responses to a survey about their privacy practices. Here’s my take on the information provided.

AOL answered every question directly and simply. Bravo!

Nicholas Graham from Ask.com gave what I thought were funny answers to nearly every question. Instead of responding directly, they answered on behalf of the yet-to-be-launched AskEraser. Here are some examples:

What search-related data–including IP addresses, cookie IDs, user identities, and search terms–do you retain?
Graham: With the upcoming launch of AskEraser, a user’s IP address, search data cookie ID and search query will be completely deleted and expunged.

How long do you retain those data?
Graham: Users of AskEraser will have their complete IP address, complete search data cookie ID, and complete search query eliminated in a few hours or less.

If you retain data for a limited period of time, is it completely deleted (in such a way that the data and backups cannot be recovered, even under court order) or is it anonymized instead?
Graham: Users of AskEraser will have their complete search query data eliminated so that no one who requests it from Ask.com will be able to access it–ever.

If the data are anonymized, exactly how do you do this?
Graham: Since users of AskEraser have their complete search data totally deleted, none of their data is ever anonymized.

But the real punchline of Ask’s survey was the final question:

We wrote last month that AskEraser will launch by the end of the year. Do you have a more specific date?
Graham: We don’t have a more specific one.

Nicholas Graham, if you are reading, would you be willing to provide the answers to the questions that would be currently accurate for Ask.com? If you know Nicholas, or know someone who knows him, will you forward this request?

Victoria Grand from Google gave an utterly obfuscating answer to the question of behavioral targeting:

Do you do behavioral targeting, meaning showing ads to users based on their behavior across multiple queries?
Grand: We are committed to protecting user privacy. We also want to provide users with a more rewarding online experience by making the advertising and content users see relevant to them. We believe the targeting capabilities, reporting and analytics we offer today provide advertisers with an excellent ROI and provide a high-quality user experience. Currently, our system incorporates a large number of signals (such as the user’s query, the user’s location, type of site, content, and the advertiser’s landing page) when targeting and ranking ads. We have not focused on demographic targeting to date for targeting ads on search result pages.

Evidently the surveyers couldn’t understand that any more than I could, so they followed up:

We weren’t able to figure out your answer to our question asking whether you do behavioral targeting. In other words, if I search for “New York City vacation” in one query and “vacation hotels” in a second query a moment later, does Google.com evaluate the two responses, figure out that I’m probably looking for New York City hotels, and display ads appropriately?
Grand: No.

Don’t they, though? I’ve been reading a lot about this adjacent query thing… wait a minute! I wrote about it two weeks ago!

Meanwhile, over on Yahoo! News… Eric Auchard is writing about Google’s unwillingness to tie together profiles across their massive collection of services for the purpose of serving up targeted ads.

What they are willing to do is use information that can be gleaned from within a given search session.

“A user who types “Italy vacation” into a Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or cheap flights to Europe. Were the same user to subsequently search for “weather,” Google will assume there is a link between “Italy vacation” and “weather” and deliver ads tied to local weather conditions in Italy.”

So do they or don’t they?

Microsoft’s Peter Cullen gave some interesting answers. He was straight up about behavioral targeting, which users can opt out of (opting in is automatic).

If you do, is there a way for users to opt out of behavioral targeting?
Cullen: Once Microsoft begins to offer behavioral ad targeting on third-party sites, we will offer customers the ability to opt out of the behavioral ad targeting by Microsoft’s network-advertising service on those Web sites. This is consistent with the privacy principles of the Network Advertising Initiative, which Microsoft announced it will join. We will also continue to develop new user controls that will enhance privacy, such as letting people search and surf our sites without being associated with a personal and unique identifier used for behavioral ad targeting.

Finally, Jim Cullinan from Yahoo wins the First Annual Kaila Colbin Blunt Award:

Do you do behavioral targeting, meaning showing ads to users based on their behavior across multiple queries?
Cullinan: Yes, we do.

If you do, is there a way for users to opt out of behavioral targeting?
Cullinan: No.

His replies oblige me to repeat a question I’ve asked many times before:

What is the real privacy issue?

I presume Yahoo does behavioral targeting because they believe it gives them a market advantage. If there were a massive market backlash, they’d be forced to drop it, right? Yet I’m equally confident that if Google announced they were going to do behavioral targeting with no possibility of opting out, there would be a HUGE uproar!

Are we giving Google the short end of the stick here? Are we just worried about Google because they’re so massively and enormously big? Or is it the other way around: should we be more worried about Yahoo than we actually are?

Do you think the marketplace is expressing a consistent and coherent view of what we want?