Privacy
Searches made by search engines, including Google, leave traces, raising concerns about privacy but sometimes facilitating the administration of justice; murderers have been detected and convicted as a result of incriminating searches they made such as "tips with killing with a baseball bat".
A search can be traced in several ways. When using a search engine through a browser program on a computer, search terms and other information will usually be stored on the computer by default, unless steps are taken to erase them. An Internet Service Provider may store records which relate search terms to an IP address and a time. The search engine provider (e.g., Google) may keep logs with the same information. Whether such logs are kept, and access to them by law enforcement agencies, is subject to legislation and working practices; the law may mandate, prohibit, or say nothing about logging of various types of information.
The technically knowledgeable and forewarned user can avoid leaving traces.
Read more about this topic: Google Search
Famous quotes containing the word privacy:
“You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one’s actual self on paper. There’s a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)