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Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, 2nd Edition

Search engines

by Charles E. MacLean

Identification: Software programs or networks of programs that search the Internet for terms entered by a user and that compile a list of Internet locations at which the term is found.

A search engine appears to users as a search box at the top of the computer page. Many search engines are available, including Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, Ask, AOL Search, Wow, WebCrawler, and many more. All these search engines serve as users’ more or less convenient path to the content on the Internet; however, many search engines also serve as a convenient path for marketers and even less scrupulous persons and groups to learn a great deal about users’ formerly private lives.

Google, the world’s leading search engine at present, with an estimated 1.1 billion users per month, routinely forwards users’ search histories, identities, and shopping patterns—for a fee—to marketers around the world. From one perspective, there is an advantage to that for the users, who receive targeted advertisements and whose search results are returned in a personally relevant order based on the user’s browsing history. Even Edward Snowden, who tipped off the world to the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) cellphone telephony metadata collection program that captures and retains the phone call history of millions of Americans, has warned us all that users must stop using Google to protect users’ privacy in this digital age. And Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Computers, derided Google and other search engines by claiming that at least Apple doesn’t “read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.”

If the upside of search engines is convenience, the downside is the user privacy that is lost in the process. Search engines operate by applying rather complex search algorithms to interpret users’ search queries, then seek information on the Internet that is relevant to those queries. How can search engine companies make any money doing that? Well, they sell priority placements so that entities willing to pay for the service will end up prominently displayed on the first page of the search results on all relevant queries. A business school in Ohio can purchase priority placement from Google to highlight their school whenever a Google user query in Ohio and contiguous states includes the words business school. Once a user has searched for, say, a laptop computer, a barrage of ads for laptop computers will appear on that user’s screen. Those pop-up targeted ads are bought and paid for by the companies selling the laptop computers. That all sounds convenient—and it is. Each time a targeted ad is clicked in Google, the company that sponsored the ad pays a fee to Google. Google’s annual income from its advertising business is estimated to be approximately $50 billion.

Users pay a steep privacy price for that convenience. As disclosed among the fine print of Google’s all-encompassing privacy policy,

When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works ..., communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. . . . This license continues even if you stop using our Services. . . . Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

In other words, in exchange for the convenience and robust search features of Google, the user must give up a great deal of privacy. To make matters worse—in fact, much worse—data captured and stored by Google can be retained by Google indefinitely, just as information on the Internet can almost never be removed. That huge store of personal data is a tremendous draw for law enforcement agencies, who can use the third-party doctrine to access that data quite easily and without notice to the user whose data were accessed.

The third-party doctrine provides that (1) only the individual whose constitutional rights were violated has standing to contest violation; (2) a search of data on an individual that is stored by a third-party did not violate the individual’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures (the individual’s physical property was not invaded or searched); and therefore, (3) upon a lawful demand from law enforcement, a third-party must turn over to law enforcement the data they seek on the individual. The third-party doctrine may have survived the pre–digital era relatively intact, but in the digital age, with users so freely sharing so much private data with third parties—as a convenience and almost as a necessity—the third-party doctrine can no longer prevail. Until it is abandoned by the courts or rendered impermissible through legislation, however, the third-party doctrine will remain the law of the land, and digital age privacy will be the victim left in its wake.

Some search engines have begun to offer more private services, and that is a sound development. Search engine DuckDuckGo, with monthly users at just two-hundredths of one percent of Google’s monthly user rate, offers private web searching that does not use cookies or log IP addresses. Ixquick, touting itself as the most private search engine, does not record users’ IP addresses or track cookies, and guarantees that it will not share users’ information with any third party. StartPage, too, holds itself out as having “state-of-the-art privacy protection.” If these more private search engines can begin to take at least some of the search engine business away from Google and other low-privacy search engines, perhaps Google and the rest will have to add more privacy protections to their search services or at least create different tiers of privacy so that users can select their preferred privacy tier.

Some of these so-called private search engines (PSE) started as direct competitors to Google and Bing but have begun to specialize in providing additional privacy features. StartPage actually uses Google search results, but without the tracking that Google includes. Similarly, DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo search results without the tracking. One PSE, Search Encrypt, uses AES-256 and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to secure data being transmitted. Gibiru bills itself as being what Google was in the beginning, avoiding the cookies that track your movements across the Internet. Another PSE called Swisscows offers similar protections but also uses artificial intelligence to learn the context of users’ searches. Almost all PSEs do not track users searches or store any information about them. Along with providing security, by offering searches done in isolation from company algorithms, these PSEs return a wider variety of less demographically-targeted results. This can be an advantage in an age where companies like Google and Facebook curate information to present users exactly what they expect and what aligns with their values.

Information once on the Internet seems always to be on the Internet, not susceptible to masking or erasure. Data relevant to a foreclosure process that occurred and was resolved many years before is still on the Internet years later, with the potential to harm the reputation of the one foreclosed against. That was the actual situation in Spain, and the injured party sued Google Spain and Google Inc. to have that irrelevant entry removed from Google’s information stores. The lawsuit was transferred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ultimately held that (1) the European Union’s (EU’s) rules apply wherever Google has a branch or subsidiary that markets its services there; (2) the EU’s data protection rules, which had been issued as an EU Directive in 1995, did apply to search engines; and (3) under certain circumstances, Internet users and persons about whom information is placed on the Internet, have a “right to be forgotten” and to have the search engine remove the private information and render it inaccessible. That “right to be forgotten” movement was violently opposed by Google in the EU, and Google is fighting even harder to keep that movement from reaching the United States.

It appears, in the digital age, that the United States has largely abdicated its responsibility to create and administer nationwide privacy determinations and protections, or have delegated those decisions to software engineers or to the entities that hire them and control— and sell—access to so much private data on individuals. That may seem like inertia or it may seem inevitable, but the European Union and its Court of Justice proved otherwise in the case out in Spain. Congress, the courts, and individuals in the United States can take a similar stand and reset the privacy bar. We need not all be victims of the next technology that will decimate our privacy while making the technology designers and search engines a fortune.

Of course, the “right to be forgotten” movement, especially in the United States, has been attacked as a variant of censorship and antithetical to free speech, but the EU has attacked those challenges as myths set up by the movement’s opponents but devoid of substance. On opponents’ claims that the “right to be forgotten” is a form of censorship, the EU maintains, “The right to be forgotten does not allow governments to decide what can and cannot be online and what should or should not be read. It is a right that citizens will invoke to defend their interests as they see fit. Independent authorities will oversee the assessment carried out by the search engine operators.” On opponents’ claims that the “right to be forgotten” violates free speech, the EU responds, “the right to be forgotten applies where the information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of data processing . . . This assessment must balance the interest of the person making the request and the public interest to have access to the data by retaining it in the list of results. [It] does not give the all-clear for people or organizations to have search results removed from the web simply because they find them inconvenient.”

It is time for this dialogue in the United States. We need not be victims of technology in the digital age. We can resume control over technology, allowing it to be used in socially responsible and constitutional ways but, in the process, limiting its ability to damage the privacy rights of us all.

Further Reading

1 

Efrati, Amir. “Google’s Data-Trove Dance.” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324170004578635812623154242.

2 

European Commission. “Myth-Busting: The Court of Justice of the EU and the ‘Right to be Forgotten.’” http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_rtbf_mythbusting_en.pdf.

3 

Goodale, Gloria. “Privacy Concerns? What Google Now Says It Can Do with Your Data.” Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2014. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/0416/Privacy-concerns-What-Google-nowsays-it-can-do-with-your-data-video

4 

Stewart, Christian. “The Best Private Search Engines—Alternatives to Google.” Medium. February 8, 2018. https://hackernoon.com/untraceable-search-engines-alternatives-to-google-811b09d5a873

See also: Apple; Cookies; Data protection regimes; Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Google; Internet service providers; National Security Agency (NSA); Right to be forgotten

Citation Types

MLA 9th
MacLean, Charles E. "Search Engines." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, 2nd Edition, edited by Jane E. Kirtley & Michael Shally-Jensen, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA2e_0199.
APA 7th
MacLean, C. E. (2019). Search engines. In J. E. Kirtley & M. Shally-Jensen (Eds.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
MacLean, Charles E. "Search Engines." Edited by Jane E. Kirtley & Michael Shally-Jensen. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2019. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.