New Search Engine Promises to Keep Your Data Private

[ZortMcGort11]

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/19/new-search-engine-promises-to-keep-your-data-private

Private.me says it encrypts, dices and geographically segregates data.

Privacy-minded Internet users gained a new search option Tuesday with the debut of Private.me.

The new service says when you perform a search “all of your personal data is immediately encrypted, sliced up and distributed between geographically dispersed nonprofit organizations.”

If you create an account you can maintain an optional search history that’s visible only to you and tweak the amount of data you share.

"[W]e have the only truly 'forgetful' system in which no single entity (including us) can access any user’s personal data without explicit consent," the site touts.

Fear about government snooping and commercialization of personal data are major selling points.

"Like anything else where privacy's concerned, you're going to make things somewhat harder on law enforcement," says Stan Stahl, Private.me's chief information officer. Stahl previously worked on secure White House teleconferencing and nuclear weapon communications systems.

“The objective for Private.me is to build an entire ecosystem in the Internet that’s more than just search,” he says, though future plans are currently held close to the vest.

Following leaks from exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed the National Security Agency’s vast phone and Internet surveillance programs beginning in June 2013, the search engine DuckDuckGo exploded in popularity with a similar privacy sales pitch.

Stahl says he likes DuckDuckGo – which doesn’t log IP addresses, use search cookies or allow third parties destinations to view search terms – but says Private.me's technology, planned expansion and optional user histories set it apart.

“You’re getting the value of data that is stored, but you're still getting the privacy of a private search or a search anonymizer. It’s really the best of both,” says Amelia Dunne, vice president of marketing at Private.me.

DuckDuckGo, which like the new service leans on search results from other sites, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Yale University computer science professor Bryan Ford, a cryptology expert, says Private.me's technology "sounds like an application of what we call threshold cryptography, which is a very well-established and basically solid technique in cryptographic literature and practice."

Ford leads a research group working to develop a secure online communications system in which encrypted data is split among "trustee" servers operated by different people.

"The security of our computing ecosystem could be improved a lot overall if threshold cryptography was used more widely in the right fashion," he says.

Ford says he's not sufficiently familiar with Private.me to offer an evaluation of the service. But, he says, "whether the practice of splitting data or trust across geographic or jurisdictional boundaries actually provides good security in a given case depends on a lot of other factors, especially the precise way in which that splitting is done, how cryptographic keys are managed, and how all the crypto is implemented."

A major part of Private.me’s potential appeal is distrust of leading search engines.

“The expectation when I use Google – and not too regularly – is that anything I type into a Google search, whether it’s incognito or anything else, is grist for the mill for Google to use that information for marketing purposes, for aggregation purposes and so on,” Stahl says.

Private.me is easy to use, but unlike Tor, the Web anonymizer that’s popular with the most privacy-minded Internet users, it does not prevent third party websites from gaining information about visitors after they arrive on the sites.

Edited August 20, 2014 by LostInSpace2012

[Tripredacus]

As I said in the deeper impressions thread, just use duckduckgo if you want anonymous searching.

[JorgeA]

Personally, I use Ixquick or StartPage.

 

DuckDuckGo recently added recommendations based on your search terms (i.e., for local establishments if you type in "Italian restaurant"), and that makes me leery.

 

--JorgeA

[ZortMcGort11]

duckduckgo and startpage both work without javascript too, which is a plus. I tried "private.me" but it didn't work without it.

:bummer.