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"How do you save a search in a non-personally identifiable way?" To a first approximation, you just... do it. Granted, if you search "{jerf's realname here} {
by jerf 6y ago
"How do you save a search in a non-personally identifiable way?"
To a first approximation, you just... do it.
Granted, if you search "{jerf's realname here} {embarrassing disease} cure" or something, in the pathological case, you could at least guess that maybe it was me, though even then my real name is far from unique, and nothing stops anyone else from running such a search.
But otherwise, if all you have is a pile of a few billion searches, you don't have any information about any of the specific searchers. Even if you search for your own specific address, you don't really get anything out of it; there's no guarantee it was you, or a friend of yours, or an automated address scraper. There isn't much you can get out of a search string without more information connected to it.
The rest of your criticisms are too powerful for the topic at hand; they don't prove we shouldn't use DDG, they prove we shouldn't use the internet at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Dahoon 6y agoAt the very least your example is PII which you cannot save and also claim to be Private.
- jerf 6y agoThe mere existence of someone is not really PII. You don't know that I did that search, nor can you connect to anything else... and this is a constructed example in which I try to jam some sort of PII into a single search is itself a bizarre example that probably corresponds to fewer than 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1,000,000 searches, if that. When's the last time you stuck your own PII into a search box and connected it to something of some sort of significance? It's a very small edge case. A search history can reveal many things about a person. The mere fact that someone, somewhere searched for "star wars harry potter crossover slash", unconnected to any other search item, doesn't reveal anything about anybody.