Being ANONYMOUS

We are sure that you would be knowing about or at least heard the news that the US government is apparently spying on almost every digital bit that passes through the nation’s optical fiber highways or is stored in data centers inside its borders. While we can’t be certain of the extent of the US government’s spying on people throughout the world, it would be hopelessly naive to believe that no snooping occurs at all.

How does it affect you?

India was one of the 38 'targets' which were spied by the NSA. That means that there are people out there who know exactly what you do over the internet. The US intelligence community doesn’t actually care if you’re searching for porn, or how to grow your own weed but we all have things we want to hide, from our loved ones, from our friends, from our communities, and from the government. If you went up to Barack Obama, or some other senior figure, and asked to see his personal email or credit card bill, what do you think their response would be? 

How to protect yourself

As it turns out Google, Bing, Yahoo – all the major search engines track your search history and build profiles on you, serving different results based on your search history. So if you are tired of being tracked take a look at these alternative search engines

1. DuckDuckGo.com

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for the privacy-conscious and our favourite among the anonymous search engines. As its privacy page says, DuckDuckGo doesn’t log any personally identifiable information. DuckDuckGo doesn’t use cookies to identify you, and it discards user agents and IP addresses from its server logs. DuckDuckGo doesn’t event attempt to generate an anonymized identifier to tie searches together – DuckDuckGo has no way of knowing whether two searches even came from the same computer.

Its home page is simple and clean – even more so than Google’s. Because DuckDuckGo knows nothing about you, it can’t serve different results to different users. You’ll get the same results as everyone else.

2. Startpage.com

If like us you all prefer Google’s search results and just want more privacy, try Ixquick’s Startpage. Startpage searches Google for you – when you submit a search, Startpage submits the search to Google and returns the results to you. All Google sees is a large amount of searches coming from Startpage’s servers – they can’t tie any searches to you or track your searches.

Startpage discards all personally identifiable information. Like DuckDuckGo, Startpage doesn’t use cookies, it immediately discards IP addresses, and it doesn’t keep a record of searches performed.

Startpage also includes a proxy feature — you can open a page in Ixquick’s proxy directly from the search results. This is slower than normal browsing, but websites won’t be able to see your IP address. The proxy also disables JavaScript to protect your privacy.

3. Ixquick.com

Ixquick is the main search engine from the company that runs Startpage. Unlike Startpage, Ixquick pulls results from a variety of sources instead of only Google – this can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much you like Google’s search results.

Ixquick and Startpage have essentially the same design. Ixquick includes the same privacy features Startpage does, including the Ixquick proxy links in the search results.

4. Blekko.com

Blekko doesn’t go as far as DuckDuckGo and Ixquick, but it’s still a big improvement over Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Blekko does log personally identifiable information, but deletes it within 48 hours. In contrast, Google stores this information for 9 months – and then anonymizes it without actually deleting it.

You can disable the data collection entirely by enabling the SuperPrivacy setting. Blekko even lets you disable ads entirely. One of the features that we liked a lot.

5. Proxy

Still want to use google but not be tracked? Want to get the best of both worlds? Don't worry we have a solution for you. For those of you, who watch American tv shows on hulu.com might be knowing this. 

One of the easiest ways to hide your computer, and thus hide yourself, online is to use proxies. Proxies act as a filter between you and the rest of the Web. You can, for instance, connect to the Web through a proxy in United States even though you're in India. We are not going to give you a tutorial here on how to use proxy for your web browser. You can easily google, oops! Search it search engine of your choice. 

However, there are limitations in using proxies. Firstly, if you use proxy to connect to a web server of, say the United States, you will get search results local to that proxy, in this case US, and not your native country. Secondly, using proxies is not completely anonymous, as there can still be traffic analysis and other programs used to counter proxies.