Users flock to anonymizing services after NSA snooping reports

Companies offering anonymous Web browsing and communication services are seeing a huge increase in business since recent news leaks about the National Security Agency's mass data collection and surveillance activities. Disconnect Search, an anonymous Web search service that launched Monday, had more than 400,000 searches by users by Thursday morning, said Casey Oppenheim, its co-founder. Disconnect, which also offers users a service to block companies from tracking them online, started working on Disconnect Search more than a year ago, before the first leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published in June. But Oppenheim said the continuing revelations about NSA data collection are driving users to the search service, he said by email. Web searches are among the most personal information that companies or the government could collect about someone, he said. "In comparison to search surveillance, I'd probably rather have my phone tapped or my email tracked because I'm filtering myself when I communicate with others in those ways," he said. "Most people don't filter their searches and don't understand how their queries are being tracked, saved, and turned into profiles that are associated with their real names and/or their IP address." Disconnect Search, a browser extension, allows Web users to continue to use their search engine of choice, but the service routes search queries through Disconnect's servers. The service also prevents search engines from passing keywords to sites that are visited from the search engine's results, and it encrypts all queries. Another anonymous search service, DuckDuckGo, has seen a steep increase in searches since the Snowden leaks. In May, the month before the first Snowden leaks were published, DuckDuckGo users searched 54.4 million times. In September, users searched 116.7 million times, said a spokesman for the company. DuckDuckGo doesn't collect or store personal information, meaning it doesn't know how many users it has.die hard 5 game for mobile adobe photoshop cs6 crack mac game counter strike extreme v7 single link awinware pdf security remover crack icarus sanctuary of the gods review amortization table excel variable interest rate samsung pc studio para windows 7 baixaki radeon 9200 se family driver windows 7 websmartz slideshow designer registration key hp laserjet 5 drivers