PHOENIX — Every day, as you search online, how often do you think about your privacy?
There's a reason the items you shopped for earlier show up in new searches. All of your online moves are tracked, stored, and sold.
It's how Google and other popular search engines make their money.
"Everything you ever do on that search engine is filed, a dossier is created for you," said Ken Colburn with Data Doctors.
"We don't have any control over what they do with that information," he added.
If it doesn't bother you, fine.
If you don't like being tracked, there are other ways to get the same fast searches.
Colburn says the search engine DuckDuckGo is free. It uses Bing, sending your online searches to them anonymously.
You get search results without tracking.
Startpage is a search engine that is also free and uses Google the same way.
"They're actually behind the scenes doing the same search on Google, blocking Google's ability to track results and track the fact it was you who typed that in," Colburn said.
These search engines make money by providing ads only on what you just typed in to search meaning there's no stored tracking or information kept.
Learn more about what Data Doctors says about these search engines.
Colburn warns, however, that DuckDuckGo and Startpage only keep your moves private for the search itself.
"Once you click on a link and you land on a webpage, that website is going to start tracking you the minute you land on it," he said.
If you want to keep all your moves private, Colburn suggests also using a browser called Brave.
"It's free and all about privacy, because it doesn't allow all those cookies and tracking items to remain," Colburn explained.
Brave blocks tracers, scripts, and ads by default.
Instead of seeing targeted ads on pages, you may see blank spaces.
Learn more about Brave from Data Doctors.
So, to get the best privacy protection, Colburn says to consider downloading the Brave browser, going to Startpage, and doing your searches there.
"This is one way to start reducing this free information on ourselves we give away every day," he said.
Since these search engines use Google and Bing, you get the same results but without the tracking.
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