Search engine privacy
Search engine privacy is a subset of internet privacy that deals with user data being collected by search engines. Both types of privacy fall under the umbrella of information privacy. 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. The collection of personally identifiable information (PII) of users by search engines is referred to as tracking. 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. However, search engines can also abuse and compromise its users' privacy by selling their data to advertisers for profit. 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. The legal framework for protecting user privacy is not very solid. The most popular search engines collect personal information, but other search engines that are focused on privacy have cropped up recently. There have been several well publicized breaches of search engine user privacy that occurred with companies like AOL and Yahoo. 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. Privacy policies 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. 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. This ties in with the phenomenon of notice and consent, which is how many privacy policies are structured. Notice and consent policies essentially consist of a site showing the user a privacy policy and having them click to agree. This is intended to let the user freely decide whether or not to go ahead and use the website. This decision, however, may not actually be made so freely because the costs of opting out can be very high. 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. 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. 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