Protecting Your Search Privacy and Your Web Browsing Activity

Защитите свою поисковую приватность и действия, совершаемые с помощью браузера

The search history you generate when using search engines like Google or Yahoo! reveals incredibly sensitive data about what you look at — or even think of looking at — on the web. These logs may be tied to your identity based on your IP address, the cookie files that the search engine places on your computer, or your account information if you've registered to use the search engine or other services offered by the provider. And as discussed earlier in the "What Can the Government Do?" section, these logs are subject to uncertain legal protections.

Considering the sensitivity of search logs and the questions surrounding their legal status, we highly recommend that you exercise great care to ensure that your identity cannot be linked to your search queries. For an in-depth discussion of how to do that, read EFF's "Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy". You should also take a look at our article on browsers[создать] to learn more about cookie management and on the anonymizing software Tor[создать] to learn more about how to mask your IP address. These same techniques can be used to protect you against logging by any web site you visit, not just search engines, and we recommend that you do use them whenever you visit a web site and don't want that site to log personally-identifying information about you and the pages that you read.

Finally, we recommend avoiding using one online portal for multiple services — e.g., try to avoid using Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail, or Google Search and Google Reader. Not only are you making it easier for the search provider to identify you by virtue of linking all of your activity to your personalized account, but you are also offering the government a convenient "one-stop shop" opportunity to access a wide range of your personal information at once. Using these "mega-portals" to manage all aspects of your online life might be convenient, but it also creates a single point of failure that raises a serious security risk.

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