If you're not using a search engine such as
Duck Duck Go, then it is very likely that the search engine you are using is tracking your every move. Search engines that value privacy and anonymity online are entering a boom following revelations of mass dragnet internet surveillance by government and business. From
The Guardian:
Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the "Prism" programme.
Through the programme, the US's National Security Agency claimed to
have "direct access" to the servers of companies including, crucially,
the web's biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers,
the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or
store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever
before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.
"It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism,"
says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of
Philadelphia on the US east coast. "We started seeing an increase right
when the story broke, before we were covered in the press." From serving
1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight.
Yet you've probably never heard of DuckDuckGo.
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