![]() ![]() DuckDuckGo does not collect or share any personal information of users, such as IP addresses or cookies, which other search engines usually do log and keep for some time. DuckDuckGo ĭuckDuckGo, founded in 2008, claims to be privacy focused. A study was done to see how much consumers cared about privacy policies of Google, specifically Gmail, and their detail, and it determined that users often thought that Google's practices were somewhat intrusive but that users would not often be willing to counteract this by paying a premium for their privacy. This means that search engine and email companies like Google and Yahoo are technically able to keep up the practice of targeting advertisements based on email content since they declare that they do so in their privacy policies. This persistent failure of consumers to read these privacy policies can be disadvantageous to them because while they may not pick up on differences in the language of privacy policies, judges in court cases certainly do. It is a well-known fact that users do not read privacy policies, even for services that they use daily, such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Yahoo, founded in 1995, also collects user data. The privacy policy of Google states that they pass user data on to various affiliates, subsidiaries, and "trusted" business partners. Google logs all search terms in a database along with the date and time of search, browser and operating system, IP address of user, the Google cookie, and the URL that shows the search engine and search query. Google, founded in 1998, is the most widely used search engine, receiving billions and billions of search queries every month. As of 2008, search engines were not in the business of selling user data to third parties, though they do note in their privacy policies that they comply with government subpoenas. Privacy minded search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, state in their privacy policies that they collect much less data than search engines such as Google or Yahoo, and may not collect any. Another big issue with putting the privacy policy in front of users and having them accept quickly is that they are often very hard to understand, even in the unlikely case that a user decides to read them. ![]() ![]() This decision, however, may not actually be made so freely because the costs of opting out can be very high. This is intended to let the user freely decide whether or not to go ahead and use the website. Notice and consent policies essentially consist of a site showing the user a privacy policy and having them click to agree. This ties in with the phenomenon of notice and consent, which is how many privacy policies are structured. While these policies may be an attempt at transparency by search engines, many people never read them and are therefore unaware of how much of their private information, like passwords and saved files, are collected from cookies and may be logged and kept by the search engine. Search engines generally publish privacy policies to inform users about what data of theirs may be collected and what purposes it may be used for. For individuals interested in preserving their privacy, there are options available to them, such as using software like Tor which makes the user's location and personal information anonymous or using a privacy focused search engine. There have been several well publicized breaches of search engine user privacy that occurred with companies like AOL and Yahoo. The most popular search engines collect personal information, but other search engines that are focused on privacy have cropped up recently. The legal framework for protecting user privacy is not very solid. In the absence of regulations, users must decide what is more important to their search engine experience: relevance and speed of results or their privacy, and choose a search engine accordingly. However, search engines can also abuse and compromise its users' privacy by selling their data to advertisers for profit. This is controversial because search engines often claim to collect a user's data in order to better tailor results to that specific user and to provide the user with a better searching experience. The collection of personally identifiable information (PII) of users by search engines is referred to as tracking. Privacy concerns regarding search engines can take many forms, such as the ability for search engines to log individual search queries, browsing history, IP addresses, and cookies of users, and conducting user profiling in general. Both types of privacy fall under the umbrella of information privacy. Search engine privacy is a subset of internet privacy that deals with user data being collected by search engines. ![]()
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