The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed the following search privacy tips. They range from straightforward steps that offer a little protection to more complicated measures that offer near-complete safety. While we strongly urge users to follow all six tips, a lesser level of protection might be sufficient depending on your particular situation and willingness to accept risks to your privacy.
1. Don't put personally identifying information in your search terms (easy)
Don't search for your name, address, credit card number, social security number, or other personal information. These kinds of searches can create a roadmap that leads right to your doorstep. They could also expose you to identity theft and other privacy invasions.
If you want to do a "vanity search" for your own name5 (and who isn't a little vain these days?), be sure to follow the rest of our tips or do your search on a different computer than the one you usually use for searching.
2. Don't use your ISP's search engine (easy)
Because your ISP knows who you are, it will be able to link your identity to your searches. It will also be able to link all your individual search queries into a single search history. So, if you are a Comcast broadband subscriber, for instance, you should avoid using
http://search.comcast.net. Similarly, if you're an AOL member, do not use
http://search.aol.com or the search box in AOL's client software.
3. Don't login to your search engine or related tools (intermediate)
Search engines sometimes give you the opportunity to create a personal account and login. In addition, many engines are affiliated with other services -- Google with Gmail and Google Chat; MSN with Hotmail and MSN Messenger; A9 with Amazon, and so on. When you log into the search engine or one of those other services, your searches can be linked to each other and to your personal account.
So, if you have accounts with services like Google GMail or Hotmail, do not search through the corresponding search engine (Google or MSN Search, respectively), especially not while logged in.
If you must use the same company's search engine and webmail (or other service), it will be significantly harder to protect your search privacy. You will need to do one of the following:
Install two different web browsers to separate your search activities from your other accounts with the search provider. For example, use Mozilla Firefox for searching through Yahoo!, and Internet Explorer for Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! service accounts.6 You must also follow Tip 6 for at least one of the two browsers.7
For Google and its services, you can use the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the CustomizeGoogle plugin software. Go to
http://www.customizegoogle.com/ and click "Install." Restart Firefox and then select "CustomizeGoogle Options" from the "Tools" menu. Click on the "Privacy" tab and turn on "Anonymize the Google cookie UID." You must remember to quit your browser after using GMail and before using the Google search engine.8 In addition, be sure not to select the "remember me on this computer" option when you log into a Google service.
If you are using a browser other than Firefox, you can use the GoogleAnon bookmarklet, which you can obtain at
http://www.imilly.com/google-cookie.htm. You will need to quit your browser every time you finish with a Google service. Unfortunately, we currently do not know of similar plugins for other search providers.9
4. Block "cookies" from your search engine (intermediate)
If you've gone through the steps above, your search history should no longer have personally identifying information all over it. However, your search engine can still link your searches together using cookies and IP addresses.10 Tip 4 will prevent tracking through cookies, while Tips 5-6 will prevent IP-based tracking. It's best to follow Tips 3-6 together -- there is less benefit in preventing your searches from being linked together in one way if they can be linked in another...
5. Vary your IP address (intermediate)
When you connect to the Internet, your ISP assigns your computer an "IP address" (for instance, EFF's web server's IP address is 72.5.169.162). Search providers -- and other services you interact with online -- can see your IP address and use that number to link together all of your searches. IP addresses are particularly sensitive because they can be directly linked to your ISP account via your ISP's logs. Unlike cookies, your IP address does not follow your computer wherever it goes; for instance, if you use your laptop at work through AT&T, it will have a different IP address than when you use it at home through Comcast...
6. Use web proxies and anonymizing software like Tor (advanced)
To hide your IP address from the web sites you visit or the other computers you communicate with on the Internet, you can use other computers as proxies for your own -- you send your communication to the proxy; the proxy sends it to the intended recipient; and the intended recipient responds to the proxy. Finally, the proxy relays the response back to your computer. All of this sounds complicated, and it can be, but luckily there are tools available that can do this for you fairly seamlessly.
Tor (
http://www.torproject.org) is a software product that encrypts then sends your Internet traffic through a series of randomly selected computers, thus obscuring the source and route of your requests. It allows you to communicate with another computer on the Internet without that computer, the computers in the middle, or eavesdroppers knowing where or who you are. Tor is not perfect, but it would take a sophisticated surveillance effort to thwart its protections.14
You also need to make sure that your messages themselves don't reveal who you are. Privoxy (
http://www.privoxy.org) helps with this, because it strips out hidden identifying information from the messages you send to web sites. Privoxy also has the nice side benefit of blocking most advertisements and can be configured to manage cookies. (Privoxy comes bundled with Tor downloads.)
You can also use web proxies like Anonymizer's (
http://www.anonymizer.com) Anonymous Surfing. This option is more user-friendly but possibly a less effective method of anonymizing your browsing. Anonymizer routes your web surfing traffic through their own proxy server and hides your IP address from whatever web sites you visit. However, Anonymizer itself could in principle have access to your original IP address and be able to link it to the web site you visited; therefore, that service is only as secure as Anonymizer's proxy facilities and data retention practices. While there is no reason to believe that Anonymizer looks at or reveals your information to others (we know the people currently running Anonymizer and they are good folks), there is little opportunity to verify their practices in these regards.
No one who uses the Internet to explore information is a criminal. Law enforcement have NO just cause to think that Internet users are just using the Internet for education purposes; no Internet use breaks the law (unless you hack a site and steal its code or data, which is impossible to prove even if you did).
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