Search engines store every search and the corresponding IP address. While they may not know your name, they know every search term you’ve ever entered from the IP address that identifies your home computer.

While it’s not exactly news, this information is very tempting for people who can throw around National Security Letters like candy, and demand search engines turn over their search data.

This is very scary, and is a permanent invasion of your privacy — there is nothing to prevent search engines from saving that data for an infinite period of time, and every reason for them to do so: data mining your personal interests could be very profitable.

Enter Scroogle. Scroogle is a google scraper — hence the name — and acts as a proxy to all your search requests. That means that google only knows that scroogle is making a search request, and not you personally. Plus scroogle deletes all logs within 48 hours, which prevents the search engines from data mining you or the feds from invading and destroying your privacy.

To make things extra easy, there’s now a Firefox plugin (also here) so that you can use Scroogle instead of Google right in your browser window.

There’s no excuse for not protecting your privacy, and if you expect Google or the US government to “just do the right thing” then you’re a fool. Scroogle is a small step in the right direction. Download and install the Firefox plugin and start using it now.

Update: You may have heard that Google are now planning on anonymizing some portions of your search data. After two years. Yippee. Good article here. I draw your attention especially to this quote:

“Google should not be in the spy business. By logging IP addresses and search strings they are running the largest intelligence operation in the world.”