Law & Society Blog

The EFF just published a six step program for protecting online search privacy, an increasingly important issue that we covered on this blog just a little while ago. The tips are:

1. Don’t put personally identifying information in your search terms (easy)
2. Don’t use your ISP’s search engine (easy)
3. Don’t login to your search engine or related tools (intermediate)
4. Block “cookies” from your search engine (intermediate)
5. Vary your IP address (intermediate)
6. Use web proxies and anonymizing software like Tor (advanced)

Few people realize how pervasive the threat to their privacy from associating search terms with their names really is. Part of the problem is that “privacy,” at least in the US discourse, has little emotional resonance. What we are really talking about here is the potential for blackmail and persecution — either today or decades from now, either in the US or abroad.

Technorati Tags: privacy, eff, google, search

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