Felix Salmon’s The long arm of the Google raises serious privacy issues.
A bond king recovering $10 million in stolen art warms everyone’s heart, but what other law enforcement searches are being done Google’s assistance?
Are they collecting data on searches for:
- “Root kit”
- Bomb making
- Cybersecurity
- Sources of guns or ammunition
- Partners with sexual preferences
- Your searches correlated with those of others
Hard to say and I would not trust any answer from Google or law enforcement on the subject.
Avoiding script kiddie spying by search engines requires the use of proxy servers or services such as Tor (anonymity network).
But none of those methods is immune from attack and all require technical skill and vigilance on the part of a user.
Let me sketch out a possible solution, at least for web searching.
What if you had:
- A human search service to do a curated search
- The search results are packaged for HTTP pickup
- A web server running in no-log mode. Never logs any data. Can pass the ID of your search for retrieval but that is all that it knows.
Thinking of a curated search because you don’t have the full interactivity of a live search.
Having a person curate the results would get you higher quality results. Like using a librarian.
Would not be free but you would not have Google, local, state and federal law enforcement looking over your shoulder.
What is it they say?
Freedom is never free.