Do you know what happens to your information? Most search engines take your data and sell it to ad companies for profit. You can be tracked with tracking cookies, which monitor and report back what sites you visit. Your searches, IP address, cookies, and browsing history are a few things that are taken and sold. You may think that there are laws to protect you when searching the internet. Sadly, this isn't the case.
While you can look up publications that describe sites like AOL and Yahoo having breaches of privacy, most of the other sites don't have very much information on what happens to your private information. And if you look closely at Google's privacy policy, they actually tell you they pass on your information to "trusted business partners", subsidiaries and affiliates. In today's world, there are dangerous people out there praying on the innocent. They steal your information like a pirate, which is why it's actually called piracy. There's even organized crime online, and they create fake businesses and aliases to steal your sensitive information. It's very important to be vigilant in keeping your information safe. If ever in doubt, read the privacy policy as well as you can.
The government has even requested Google's data for its defense in COPA. Luckily, Google refused to give away this information. Although it's understandable the government would want to protect the children, do you really think it's okay for them to be granted access to such delicate information of everyone, just to get a chance at catching a criminal? Even police need warrants to come inside and search through your private home, so why shouldn't we need some type of protection online as well? In 2013, Yahoo was hacked and over 1.5 billion user accounts were breached. In 2015, there were over 500 million. The information that was stolen was stuff like birthdays, usernames and passwords, phone numbers, and even security questions that can be used to reset passwords. So what do you do to protect yourself? There are browsers out there like the Tor browser that will mask your IP address and helps you protect your private information. DuckDuckGo is another great search engine that tells users they do not track your cookies. They mask your IP address and make it anonymous as well.
Supreme Search is another search engine that emphasizes on protecting searchers' privacy and do not provide any personalized search results. So go ahead an give them a try!
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