Many people, including my self, search using the Google scraper Scroogle to get search-results from Google and Yahoo without letting them know that it is actually me who is doing the search-request. You type your keywords into Scroogle, it passes them on to Google or Yahoo, fetches the results, and presents it in a beautifully clean way. But how much do you actually hide when you are using Scroogle? Nothing and everything.
Google learns nothing about you and your IP, and it can’t set or check a browser-cookie or anything else for that matter, all Google sees is that Scroogle, or someone using Scroogle, is searching for a set of keywords.
So it’s safe to use if you want to avoid being tracked by Google and Yahoo, right? Yes, that’s right.
But imagine that you’re a advesary who want to be able to profile people who want privacy on the Internet. How would you go about doing that? Simple. Create a honeypot which “protects you” from Big Brother and direct the privacy concerned users there.
Scroogle doesn’t set a cookie or attempt to track you in any obvious way, but it does record your IP when you are doing a search. Scroogle claims that they only store it for 48 hours, and perhaps they do. Perhaps they don’t. Lets assume they do delete the logs within 48 hours and that Scroogle is run by good and honest people. That’s an assumption, one you have to make by using any service who scrapes a search-engine in order “to protect you” from Big Brother. It’s not something you can rely on as a fact. So, at the end of the day, you’re still taking a chance.
Scroogle, and services like it, may be good and have value, but they are basically nothing more than services who allow you to shift your blind trust in one service over to another service who could be “good” or “evil”.
The only way you can be sure that search-engines or search-engine scrapers are not tracking you and your search-keywords is by making sure they can’t. Use secure solutions who allow you to browse the Internet anonymously, disallows cookies who are not required to use a service and remove those who are required immediately after logging out of a site – and you’re all set.
Search-engine scrapers are basically one-hop proxies who do a specific task. And one-hop proxies should not be trusted. Not because you think or don’t think that a given one-hop service is tracking you, but because they can. Onion-routing systems like Tor use three hops where no single hop can track you.
Someone could be tracking you when you’re using a search-engine scraper or a traditional one-hop proxy. Why take the chance? Use something like Tor and make sure they can’t.
