Search engines including Google can and will retain information about your web searches. It is possible that this information could land itself to authorities in the US (or elsewhere) thanks to the Patriot Act. Here is a video of Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, basically affirming that your search privacy could be compromised.
There are many ways your can protect your privacy. You could do a search for ‘private surfing’ and follow the result links until you find a suitable tool or a proxy surfing site. You could install programs such as Private Proxy (http://www.privateproxysoftware.com/).
Many users prefer to use an online proxy site to protect their online privacy. PublicProxyServers.com provides a database of many good anonymous proxy sites. You can pick your proxy site sorted by domain, rating, country, access time, % of up-time, online time and last test. Once you pick a particular proxy site you might see some ads posted on the top of the page while browsing your sites of interest. Most of the proxy sites only have the top banner ad so your surfing experience should be relatively good if you can tolerate the top banner ad. Most if not all of the proxy sites found on PublicProxyServers.com work well with most if not all search engines, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon as well as other popular sites –effectively bypassing any firewalls forbidding access to these sites.
You could also create your own private proxy. There are several free scripts you can download. One of those is Glype. You can install (Glype) on a free host. There are many free hosts on the internet where you can run Glype. Using a proxy server such as Glype ensures that your browsing is completely anonymous. Your IP or destination URLs are completely hidden. Here is a video that shows how you can install Glype.
There are search engines that claim to completely respect your privacy. One of those is Cuil, which was started by former Google employees. Another search engine fully midful of your privacy is Startpage.com
Tags: internet privacy, internet proxy, online privacy, safe surfing
