SummerLite said:
Thanks Scottie, I followed your instructions . I have a question. I have a lot of sites saved on favorites and I'm wondering what happens when I click on those. Are they going through the same old process of being able to be tracked without the privacy features unlike when I use duckduckgo for serching? If so is there something I can do about this? Thanks
All bookmarks are just links, which means they are all GET requests.
GET = your browser says, "hey, give me this web page!"
POST = your browser sends data to the remote site, like for submitting a search form, POSTing a SOTT article, etc.
Example: searching on SOTT
Go to homepage. Search for "bush pants on fire"
The search box does a POST request, so the address bar always shows: https://www.sott.net/
Your search terms remain Top Secret.
But now if you click the grey copy icon at the top of the search results, you get a SOTT Search Link, which for this search is like so:
https://www.sott.net/?search=bush%20pants%20on%20fire&page=1
That's a GET request. It's the exact same search, but everything after the "?" is the search variables. In this case:
- search = bush pants on fire
- page = 1
That's the same data sent to the server when you search from the SOTT search box, only it's visible in the URL, and thus visible to your ISP and everybody else who might be watching.
This allows sharing of search results, but the only way to do that is as a normal link - but with all the "GET variables" appended after the "?".
So a SOTT Search Link with the search terms in the URL is a GET request, but modified:
GET + variables = your browser says, "get me this web page!" as usual, but the extra variables pass visible data along to make the search go
That's just kind of how web browsers work, so you can't really make bookmarks you visit more secure, unless you use something like Tor or whatever.
When you click a Search Link from SOTT, your search is known to the universe. For normal bookmarks, the best you can hope for is that HTTPS:// works if they are only HTTP:// prefixed links.
The interesting thing with Google searches is that they always do GET requests. So, even in Private Browsing Mode with Do Not Track turned on in your browser - and even when the site is encrypted via SSL (https://), all your search terms + other bits of data are still visible in the google URLs... which means somebody can still see what you're searching for.
DuckDuckGo has this POST request feature, which stops this "search term leakage", as they call it.
