Maintaining privacy is becoming hard and can be daunting for many. Privacy in a corporate setting is often essential for guarding against potential competitors and growing future revenue. Fortunately Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and smaller companies provide ways to delete search history although hiding from those ads can be difficult.
Google makes it easy to find your personal web history, manage it, and even delete it. You can visit Google.com/history and log into your Google account. You will be able to see your entire history and can browse it by category.
If you would like this history to be removed then you can click the gear icon which can be found at the upper right of the page. You can select Settings from the menu. Here you can turn off the search history application so that Google will not save your future searches. You can also delete your history from Google’s database or just remove specific items from your recent history.
You can turn-off and erase your search history on Microsoft Bing at bing.com/profile/history. Yahoo allows you to turn off future search histories but does not have a specific method to delete the old one. Visit search yahoo.com/preferences/ to turn off your history.
Recently however, PrivateInternetAccess.com stumbled into a serious issue using Google search. If Google searches are not conducted through a VPN or Tor, searches could be linked to your IP address and made public. It can be distressing that websites can make your search traffic publicly available to the internet in its entirety, including Google’s web crawlers. According to PrivateInternetAccess.com, these websites track URLs, referring URLs, and Google search queries for each site on which it is enabled and:
“Then, it creates pages which list each of the search queries or referrers along with the visitor’s IP address. Google then indexes these pages, making it simple for anyone to search for an IP and connect it to a specific website visit or a search query. Even using your browser’s private or incognito mode will not hide your IP. The only way to protect yourself is to be truly private by making your IP address invisible to these tracking sites in the first place.” – PrivateInternetAccess.com
Therefore, we would recommend using a VPN when you visit search engines such as Google, or you would like to keep competitors or the public off your trail. In industries like oil and gas for example, it is becoming important for exploration and field engineers to maintain anonymity whilst looking for new reserves of hydrocarbons. By using a VPN even in areas as seemingly innocuous as search engines, companies can maintain an edge of confidentiality that could help to produce added revenue in the future.
This Blog was brought to you by Hypersocket and its CEO, Lee David Painter. With over 20 years of industry experience as a pioneer in IT Security, Lee developed the world’s first OpenSource browser-based SSL VPN (SSL-Explorer). Today Lee runs Hypersocket, a leader in virtual private network technology.
