Gigablast does not give your IP address to any third parties, nor allow any third party to deduce what queries might be coming from your IP address. Read the text below to understand what we mean by deduce.
In the summer of 2013 Edward Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor, described a secret NSA project known as project PRISM, and more recently Muscular. These NSA projects wire tap not just live data traversing the internet, but also has automated access to large data repositories controlled by major internet companies. The data repositories consist of anything from search engine query logs and private emails to chat histories, among others. With today's fairly accurate audio-to-text transcription software, even services like Skype audio and video calls are being tapped.
Such data access makes it very easy for government agencies like the NSA to set up large search engines that index these data streams and execute a list of queries on such search engines in order to profile and flag individuals for further examination.
Some search engines on the internet purport to protect your privacy, and they do a decent job, but since they are not actually search engines, they relay your queries to a major 3rd party search engine. But since Gigablast is the ONLY search engine in the United States that only serves results from it's own index and does not have PRISM installed, you know we are not sending your queries off to a major search engine (which is tapped by the NSA) to get the results.
The danger in being a query-relay service is that the NSA could easily tap the incoming internet lines going into the relay-service to get the IP address of any of the data packets containing the encrypted query. They could then use time-correlation methods to associate the incoming IP address with the query received on the large search engine (the final destination of the query) where they already have a PRISM listening device installed.
Consider this scenario. Joe Smith sends his query to his favorite privacy-enabled search engine, supersafesearch.com. His search query is encrypted as it travels across the internet to supersafesearch.com's server. However, his IP address is not encrypted. After all, the information supersafesearch.com sends to Joe will contain Joe's IP address and that needs to be unencrypted so the Internet routers can properly route it back to Joe. So, technically speaking, the NSA or Joe's ISP can easily infer that Joe Smith is communicating with supersafesearch.com and at what time he is doing so. Furthermore, at about that same time, the NSA ascertains that ten different queries were sent from supersafesearch.com to a large search engine that has PRISM installed. Therefore, the NSA could conclude, merely based on the timing alone, that one of these ten queries was conducted by Joe. Then perhaps Joe conducts a second query, of similar topic to the previous one. The NSA repeats the process, and then based on the query topic similarity, and cross-referencing IPs accessing supersafesearch.com at that time, concludes that Joe Smith is behind the queries.
So the next time you use a search engine that is touting privacy, you need to ask yourself if they are really just a query-relay service, ultimately relaying your query to a search engine in the PRISM program, or if they actually have their own index. Otherwise, the IP address of your search queries can be deduced based on simplistic temporal analysis.
Once you understand this technical explanation, the truth is clear. Because it only serves results from its own index, Gigablast is the only search engine capable of delivering true privacy.
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