Reducing Search Engine Privacy Risks

Nearly anybody using the Internet in recent years is using search engines on a frequent basis. Even though many of us may believe it’s relatively private given that we don’t log in to the search engines or enter user names or passwords, the truth is that the search engine vendors are saving the search data, records of pages accessed, and even our typing mistakes. If they or somebody interested wants to do so, they can often get access to that data and use it to identify the people and build a profile that they may then use as “evidence” to paint a picture of a person’s behavior to be used against them in court, employment reviews, blackmail, extortion, or other means. In this article, I’ll describe some of the risks and steps you can take to reduce the threat to your privacy and personal freedom of speech.

Search Keywords and History Can Be Used to Misportray You

This can be very dangerous for people who are researching a topic that may be controversial. For instance, you may decide you want to research tools and techniques for automatically blocking people from putting foul content on a website you are running in the comments they are leaving without having to moderate every one. Or perhaps you are researching a medical problem your child is having. Along the way, you may inadvertently visit some websites that contain “dirty pictures” or other similar content. The government can later use the record of your legitimate searches and the history of pages you visited to build a case against you as a criminal, even though you are not. In many ways this is no different than how they spin other “evidence” to misportray what a person was doing and why, but in the case of Internet search engine data you may have thought you were anonymous when in fact you were not. That’s because data mining can be used to connect all the electronic little trails you leave to both identify you and to build whatever picture the government wants to make in its connect-the-dots game.

Any Litigation Increases Your Search Engine Privacy Risk

According to CNET, companies with employment disputes and divorcing spouses are getting into the act of using search engine queries and behaviors to find dirt on their targets:

(from CNET: How Search Engines Rate on Privacy)
Search privacy is important because our Googling (and Yahooing, and MSNing and so on) provides a unique glimpse into our personalities and private lives. Search terms have been used to convict a wireless hacker and lock up a man charged with killing his wife. Search engine activity is also a fertile growth area for nosy divorce lawyers and employment disputes.

Any time you are involved in litigation, the risk of your privacy being compromised goes up exponentially. You and your attorney may try to block subpoenas that are being used for fishing expeditions and to harass you with the expense of complying with them, but there is no guarantee that you will succeed. It could be that some transient curiosity you were investigating years ago can be resurrected to provide fodder to tar and feather you with damaging accusations.

Search Records Don’t Expire

Even more frightening is that there isn’t really any time limit on how long this data is kept. For instance, Google keeps it “forever” although it claims to scrub some of the personally identifying information after varying periods of time.

Search Engines Inappropriately Release Records

Sometimes, this information gets released in a fashion that allows many people to use it to track down the identities and behaviors of Internet users. For instance, AOL on August 4, 2006, released a file containing about 20 million search keywords used by 650,000 user over a period of 3 months. New York Times reporters were able to show how it was possible to use that data to track down and identify individual people. Today you can not only read about this incident in articles like About AOL Search Data Scandal, you can actually access that data and explore it yourself via the web site AOLstalker.com.

Steps You Can Take To Protect Your Privacy

There are dozens of steps you can take to improve your online privacy and reduce the risk of information being collected and associated with you. The problem is that nearly every one of these steps involves either some manual effort or some sacrifices. The ideal mix of measures will vary from person to person. The following list is by no means comprehensive, but touches upon many of the options you have. While there is probably no surefire way to totally protect your privacy on the Internet, using a mix of these options can reduce the risk significantly.

Don’t Use the Internet or Computers

Obviously, you could avoid using search engines altogether. You could even avoid using the Internet. But your computer can still be seized by the government and whatever data is on it can still be subpoenaed. You could get rid of your computer, of course only after securely erasing everything on it. But that’s too large a sacrifice for most people.

Select Search Engines Based Upon Privacy Policies

You can select search engines that retain data for shorter periods of time and do not link information to anything identifiable about you such as your IP address. Search engines Ask and Ixquick both claim to be safer in these regards that big players such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. Ixquick in particular stopped recording IP addresses as of January 28, 2009.

Use Anonymous Web Browsing Proxies

Ixquick introduced anonymous proxy searching and page retrieval on January 28, 2010. While their service can block many risks such as cookies being left in your browser, it may not work well with some sites because JavaScript is disabled, some text input forms will not work, and the delay from the proxy page loading may be annoying to some.

From a web publisher’s viewpoint, proxy services like this also often break features critical to earning some revenue on content advertising. For instance, Google advertising often will not display on such services. If it does, the credit for the content generating clicks may go to the proxy provider instead of the content publisher.

There are many other proxy browsing web services available today. You can find a bunch of them listed in the article 20 Proxy sites to browse the net anonymously. Not all of them work the same, so if you’re truly concerned about your privacy you should both read the site’s usage and privacy information and do some experimenting to see how they may differ.

Using proxies is further complicated by IP service providers, companies, universities, or even entire nations blocking the proxies as part of their censorship practices. You may find that an anonymous browsing proxy you like could be banned at some point by whatever forces control your access to the Internet. This is often done to prevent users from accessing content deemed offensive or threatening. China, for instance, has taken this behavior to an extreme. Chinese free speech activists spend a lot of time and effort creating means for their citizens to bypass the Internet Great Wall on demand, but the Chinese government is never more than a few steps behind.

American companies and universities routinely block Internet proxies for similar reasons as China’s government. Some also have the reasoning that they want to stop bandwidth-sapping activities such as video streaming or prevent illegal copying of intellectual property such as music and videos for which they could be sued.

Configuring Your Web Browser to Disallow Cookies, JavaScript, and Web Browsing History

Another step you can take to improve your Internet privacy is to disable cookies and JavaScript in your web broswer. However, many web sites, particularly those involving shopping, will not work when cookies and JavaScript are disabled.

Many browsers today either offer the ability to disable the browsing history or to use “incognito windows” to turn off the history for some of the browsing you do.

Turn Off Online Web Browsing History or Remove History Records

If you’re a Google user, you may not realize that having a Google account means that your browsing history is likely being recorded by Google. You can see how this is configured and turn it off by going to your Google Dashboard. You can view your web browsing history records associated with your account by going to Google Web History. From there, you can find “remove items” on the left hand side of the page and click on that to remove some or all of the entries. Keep in mind that this probably does absolutely nothing to most of the information Google retains on your searches and pages visits, but it does at least put them a few steps removed from your user account.

Cleaning Your Computer

You can also frequently delete cookies and web browsing history from your computer. But that’s not enough as the files may remain on your computer where they can be resurrected from your recycle bin or free space by deleted file recovery programs. You’d also need to scrub the files away and scrub your free disk space, too. One free program to do that is File Shredder 2. It can securely erase files, folders, and free space on most types of writable storage devices such as hard disk drives.

Using Internet Encryption Proxies

Going further, you can use programs that allow you to encrypt and proxy nearly everything you do on the Internet. One such popular free program is TOR, also known as The Onion Router. It is published by Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil rights organization working to protect people’s rights involving technologies such as computers, networks, and cell phones. It uses a combination of encrypted tunnels and a varying network of proxies to make it very difficult for anybody to track a user’s Internet activity. While TOR also offers tools that work with the popular Firefox browser to make it convenient to use, it can be used with nearly any browser or Internet application if you’re willing to spend the time configuring the software properly and the program doesn’t need high speed bandwidth. If you’re a free speech advocate, you can even volunteer to help other people protect their free speech and privacy rights by running a TOR relay.