What's the reality of privacy, beyond all of the Internet-activist scare campaigns? Consumers want their information protected, in theory, and yet sell out their privacy in a heartbeat to save a buck. Businesses have to worry about keeping data safe from hackers while making it available to employees.

California state legislators crafted a Draconian bill and made data protection the responsibility of businesses. Governor Schwarzenegger would prefer the state government work with business to establish a standard and allow self-regulation. Self-regulation seems like a reasonable goal because the businesses themselves have learned to use privacy as a marketing issue — a smart ploy, again, when you're falling behind in actually exploiting private data.

Microsoft and rival search engine Ask have tried to disparage Google for the search engine's use of consumer data to target ads. Never mind that they'd like to do the same, if they could only figure out how. Google is willing to take further steps to protect user data — but only if everyone agrees on a universal standard. And so the competition continues to bash them. Consumers fret over Street View photographs on Google Maps displaying their butt cracks, while they happily sign up to personalize Google searches.

In politics as well as business, a free market should reign. Google's competitors can nip at its heels and tie up its lobbyists in fighting privacy-protection bills. That's the way our money-driven democracy works, after all. The statehouse, in the end, is just another field of battle.

• Inevitable. Microsoft and Ask's recent announcements actually follow Google's own steps in improving its privacy policies. Google was singled out, pressured, and forced into data retention changes by the European Union. Google gets blamed for being the first mover because they were forced to; Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask are lauded for doing the same voluntarily, even though the EU was about to force similar changes on the whole search market anyway.
• Irrelevant. With less data to be leveraged for advertising, Microsoft and Ask's stores of private data are less valuable to advertisers and less worrisome for users.
• Ineffective. It's not clear any of these measures are truly effective at protecting what activists idealize as "privacy," and it's not clear that users really care about the issue deeply.
• And nonetheless: Ingenious. Google has everything to lose in this debate, and Microsoft and Ask everything to gain. Privacy is the one arena where Google's success can be cast as a negative. And the more pervasive Google's online offerings become, the more Ask and Microsoft can raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt about users' private data.

And just when you start to hope they've abandoned the "algorithm" branding, after 30 seconds of "I got what I was looking for... He got what he was looking for" repeated incessantly, the spot ends with "Ask: The Algorithm" being entered in a search box. Ugh.

One has to ask: didn't they abandon the Jeeves mascot because they wanted to be perceived as a serious technology company?

[Video posted to YouTube by Techcrunch.]

A glorious partnership for two unstoppable up-and-comers!

Ask.com and Lycos team up in search deal [Reuters]
Ask and Lycos death-spirograph [Alexa]