AOL’s recent release of search histories on tens of thousands of customers, really made the earth quake, the posion arrows fall from the sky and the pillars of corporate offices shake. An article in the New York Times,
How to Digitally Hide (Somewhat) in Plain Sight by J. D. Biersdorfer (August 12, 2006) [ Link through Google News ] points out that there are resources to help your web searching and surfing be a little more private.
The truth is that most people don’t realize that their searching is easily trackable. Seach engines track searches by IP address, by cookies and by session. The cool thing about libraries is that there is an aggregate anonymizing effect as a result of the volume of searches through a network that may share one IP address. This doesn’t help the poor soul who logs into AOL or MSN and then starts searching using the conveniently located search box. Overall, I think searching at the library is a bit more anonymous than searching from home.
The article points out that Clusty.com (a.k.a. Vivisimo) and IXQuick.com claim to not track user searches. In addition, there are a number of anonymizing web sites that hide your IP Address including BeHidden.com (http://behidden.com) and The Cloak (www.the-cloak.com). Unfortunately, general web surfing using anonymizers can be pretty inconvenient. This only really keeps site owners from seeing where you are coming from not what you’re doing. So, searching for your SSN will show up in their logs and if they ever get released or hacked.
NPR recently ran a story on the Identity Angel / Carnegie Mellon Data Privacy Project that mines the web and online resources for private information on individuals like SSN, Drivers License number, mother’s maiden name, etc…. . If it discovers enough information on you, it sends an email letting you know that a thief could steal your identity and what to do about it.