Simple Privacy Fix #2
Search Without Being Profiled
The Issue
Every search you type gets logged, timestamped, and linked to you as a person — building a detailed profile of your interests and worries, one query at a time. That profile is not a side effect. It’s the product being sold to advertisers.
The Privacy Risk
Search profiles get shared across advertising networks, which is why a single search can trigger ads that follow you across unrelated websites for days. This isn’t speculative: in September 2025, France’s data protection authority fined Google 325 million euros for steering users toward ad tracking without valid consent — one entry in over seven billion euros of GDPR fines issued since 2018.
Simple Fixes
These are the tools we personally use and recommend. Both meet our listing criteria: no advertising business model built on tracking you, no data selling, personally tested by us.
StartpageNo tracking
Our primary recommendation. Startpage strips your identifying information, sends your query to Google anonymously, and returns Google’s own results — so you get the exact same result quality you’re used to from the big search engines, just without anyone building a profile on the other end. No compromise on search quality, full compromise removed on tracking. Its Anonymous View feature goes a step further, letting you open results without exposing your identity to the destination site either.
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DuckDuckGoNo tracking
A solid alternative. DuckDuckGo does not save your search history and has no way to tie your searches back to you personally. Ads, when shown, are based only on the word you just typed — not a profile built from your past behaviour or location. Simple to set as your default in any browser, no account required.
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From the Blog
Further reading from the Pretty Simple Privacy blog.
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