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How to Protect the Most Privacy with the Least Effort: Change Search Engines
How to Protect the Most Privacy with the Least Effort: Change Search Engines
By Jay Stanley
If you use Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other service that tracks your search terms, there is no reason not to change search engines today.
When you do a search with these companies, they log your IP address and search terms, and store that data for varying periods of time. If you are logged in with them, they know much more about your identity, and can combine your search history with other sensitive information they have about you. And of course, these records, once stored, can be (among other things) obtained by government agencies very easily under the Patriot Act and other laws. In the last half of 2013, for example, Google reports that it was required to hand over information about 42,648 user accounts.
Everybody today realizes that our privacy is under assault. There are things you can do to protect yourself, but a lot of them require varying degrees of technological expertise and/or willingness to put up with inconveniences. Changing to a privacy-protective search engine, however, may be the one step that will do the most to protect one’s privacy with the least amount of cost, effort, or expertise.
That’s because search query records can be one of the most personal and revealing data streams that we create. They are a rich reflection of our problems, our interests, our work, our hobbies—and often our every fleeting thought. And aside from opening ourselves to such broad scrutiny, there are often particular searches that we may be especially keen not to have recorded. Curious what that odd-sounding sexual fetish that you saw referenced is all about? Writing a screenplay and searching for details on how to commit a heinous crime? Curious about some horrible disease, but not eager to have some internet company thinking you might have it?
In 2006, AOL, as a public service to researchers, released a large set of searches that had been conducted on its sites. The identity of the searchers was removed and replaced with an arbitrary number, though all the searches by the same individual were still gathered under the same identifier. The New York Times quickly found that it was not hard to identify many of the searchers through the content of their searches, which often revealed information such as home town, neighborhood, age, sex, and other details. AOL apologized and took down the database, but the incident has become a defining example of how search engine history can have powerful privacy implications. CNET went through the database and found many personal and often disturbing search sets. Together they provide an electrifying sense of just how intimate and revealing the information one “shares” with a search engine can be. To take just one of the examples found by CNET, an AOL user whose searches revealed him or her to be a resident of Ohio’s Mahoning County had a search record that included:
- more -
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/how-protect-most-privacy-least-effort-change-search-engines
By Jay Stanley
If you use Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other service that tracks your search terms, there is no reason not to change search engines today.
When you do a search with these companies, they log your IP address and search terms, and store that data for varying periods of time. If you are logged in with them, they know much more about your identity, and can combine your search history with other sensitive information they have about you. And of course, these records, once stored, can be (among other things) obtained by government agencies very easily under the Patriot Act and other laws. In the last half of 2013, for example, Google reports that it was required to hand over information about 42,648 user accounts.
Everybody today realizes that our privacy is under assault. There are things you can do to protect yourself, but a lot of them require varying degrees of technological expertise and/or willingness to put up with inconveniences. Changing to a privacy-protective search engine, however, may be the one step that will do the most to protect one’s privacy with the least amount of cost, effort, or expertise.
That’s because search query records can be one of the most personal and revealing data streams that we create. They are a rich reflection of our problems, our interests, our work, our hobbies—and often our every fleeting thought. And aside from opening ourselves to such broad scrutiny, there are often particular searches that we may be especially keen not to have recorded. Curious what that odd-sounding sexual fetish that you saw referenced is all about? Writing a screenplay and searching for details on how to commit a heinous crime? Curious about some horrible disease, but not eager to have some internet company thinking you might have it?
In 2006, AOL, as a public service to researchers, released a large set of searches that had been conducted on its sites. The identity of the searchers was removed and replaced with an arbitrary number, though all the searches by the same individual were still gathered under the same identifier. The New York Times quickly found that it was not hard to identify many of the searchers through the content of their searches, which often revealed information such as home town, neighborhood, age, sex, and other details. AOL apologized and took down the database, but the incident has become a defining example of how search engine history can have powerful privacy implications. CNET went through the database and found many personal and often disturbing search sets. Together they provide an electrifying sense of just how intimate and revealing the information one “shares” with a search engine can be. To take just one of the examples found by CNET, an AOL user whose searches revealed him or her to be a resident of Ohio’s Mahoning County had a search record that included:
calories in bananas
aftermath of incest
how to tell your family you're a victim of incest
pottery barn
curtains
surgical help for depression
oakland raiders comforter set
can you adopt after a suicide attempt
- more -
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/how-protect-most-privacy-least-effort-change-search-engines
7 replies
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