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Privacy Enabled Search Engines

by Myron Estibeiro on Monday, Sep 21, 2020

In the early days, when we didn’t know something, we would ask our parents or elders. With today’s digital transformation, we would normally run to a large search engine, provided by the big tech giants. These providers store and log countless search terms every day. Have you ever wondered what these tech giants do with the infinite data that is collected via the search engines?

Yes, you’ve guessed it right. They index it in their large data warehouses where they run complex machine learning algorithms to profile users, predict patterns and harness intelligence from this big data. This information is used to make product recommendations, shared to third parties to boost sales, etc. The real question is, how far would you trust these search engines with respect to your personal privacy?

This post is a follow-up to reasonable secure browsing. As a Security and a Privacy paranoid person, I would always recommend alternate search engines for better privacy protection. Below are two widely used Secure and Privacy focussed search engines that I use:

  1. DuckDuckGo – This is my personal favourite and it is integrated in my Firefox browser. I absolutely love it for it’s Security, Trackers Blocking and Sleek Integration features. It has a feature-rich plugin for the Firefox browser that ranks all the sites you visit and displays a privacy score, while blocking the violating content. It can also be used on your Android and iOS based mobile devices – Do give this a try, and feel the difference! https://duckduckgo.com/

DDG DDG

  1. StartPage – This a Dutch search engine company that emphasises on online privacy. The coolest feature about this search engine is that for the extra paranoid, it offers an ‘Anonymous View’ that allows users to search results via a proxy. I absolutely love their marketing phrase – “We don’t log or share user personal information. Ever. We believe it’s Your Data. Not Big Data “. Try StartPage from https://www.startpage.com



References:
  https://duckduckgo.com/
  
https://www.startpage.com

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