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PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

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Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#2
Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc.

Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in?

Obviously you can use VPNs or TOR to be really safe, but do you need to go that far if you want an untracked search on Google and Bing?

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#3

Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc. Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in? Obviously you ca…

They have access to IP+time, your search query, and cookies for correlation to other requests. It's valuable information and Google openly documents that they are keeping and using it, along with anything else you leak to them: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

IP+time is enough to get your personal identity information from your ISP (physical location of the endpoint, billing information), I have no idea if Google's relationship with ISPs is good enough to buy that or if it's only available to cops.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#4

Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc. Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in? Obviously you ca…

Based on the leaked PRISM presentation, they could send your search log to NSA, and NSA can identify you based on your IP address that your ISP provides.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#6

Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc. Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in? Obviously you ca…

The IP address from which you send your request to a search engines website may be regarded as a personally identifying information. In case that this information becomes publicly available the connection between your search terms and your IP address will be visible. In fact, this has happend in the past and there was a searchable database with the leaked information online where you could look up search terms.

I don't know what data Google and Bing are collecting, but here is one quote from the wikipedia entry on internet privacy concerning the AOL search engine:

A search engine takes all of its users and assigns each one a specific ID number. Those in control of the database often keep records of where on the Internet each member has traveled to. AOL’s system is one example. AOL has a database 21 million members deep, each with their own specific ID number. The way that AOLSearch is set up, however, allows for AOL to keep records of all the websites visited by any given member. Even though the true identity of the user isn’t known, a full profile of a member can be made just by using the information stored by AOLSearch. By keeping records of what people query through AOLSearch, the company is able to learn a great deal about them without knowing their names.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy

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