According to the recent result of Search Engine Market Share, Google take the lead with 75.49% of share, Bing with 9.89%, Baidu at 9.19% and Yahoo at 2.83%. These are the famous search engines that Internet users most utilize for their daily routine nowadays. You may find very easy and convenient to use them for navigation; however, have you ever noticed that all these large search engines are quite busy collecting as much data about you as they can? Don’t be surprised! You have been tracked by either Google, Yahoo, Baidu or Bing during the whole time.
Let us show you some examples about what information they have been collecting from you:
- All kind of search results (images, websites…etc.)
- All the communications or conversations
- All the comments you posted on the blogs or forums
- Any search results that you clicked on
- Web crawling
- Emails
- Site analytics
- and much more!
With all the mentioned information above collected, these famous search engines are capable to create a profile about you. And then use such data somewhere for their benefits or even sell it to any advertisers.
To be honest with you, Google appears to be the worst offender within all these providers. They track not only your browsing and searching history, but also other bigger data! In 2013, Google admitted the fact of utilizing the Street View cars to take the pictures of the road, and even steal Internet users’ usernames, passwords and other sensitive data from people’s living places.
As a result, these search engines are collaborating unethical practices in some ways. We should learn that we don’t get something for nothing just like the common saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Because we are trading our privacy for free services such as internet browsers, email, mobile operating systems, social media, and all the online functions you can get.
Image by Robinraj Premchand from Pixabay
