Simple ways to enhance your Internet privacy
Recent disclosures of U.S. government surveillance of our phone and Internet activity have heightened interest in services that promise not to collect or share our personal information.
One such service is DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine that has seen its traffic jump since news broke earlier this month of the National Security Agency's PRISM electronic surveillance program. The Guardian's Stuart Dredge reports that DuckDuckGo's daily search count reached an all-time high of 3.1 million on June 17, well above its daily average of 1.8 million daily searches prior to the PRISM revelations.
Those numbers are dwarfed by Google's search traffic. According to research firm ComScore, Google handled 13.4 billion search queries in May 2013 for a daily average of more than 400 million searches per day. In a post from May 2011 I described privacy-centric alternatives to Google, Gmail, and Facebook, one of which is the Ixquick.com search engine that, like DuckDuckGo, promises not to record your IP address or any other information about your search. (The service was recently rebranded in the U.S. as Start Page.)
