Protecting Your Data – Be Careful About Web Browser Add Ons

I have written a lot of articles lately about protecting your privacy on the internet. I’ve covered topics such as web browsers, internet search engines and using virtual private networks (VPN’s). These are all good ways to protect your privacy, but something new came my way today that I felt was worthy of reporting.

This latest discovery came about innocently enough. As CEO of Zeekly.com (a new internet search engine that protects privacy) it is normal to take feedback from users, and then use this information to improve our services. In this case, a number of users had requested we look into creating a custom toolbar that would add a Zeekly.com search box to their web browser. This seemed reasonable to us, so we did some research on it.

There is a very well known company Alexa (www.alexa.com) that tracks statistics on 30 million websites (visitors, pages viewed, etc). They’ve been around a long time, are owned by Amazon.com, and are generally well respected. One of the products they offer is the Alexa Toolbar, and they allow a company such as Zeekly to create a custom toolbar (branded with our company logo) that can be installed in most of the well known web browsers on the market (internet explorer, firefox, chrome). This was a nice looking product, so we decided to give it a try. Within a few minutes, we had a terrific looking toolbar complete with a Zeekly search box, links to our blog, facebook and twitter, and it even displayed a live feed of our company news. Great, right? Wrong.

We put a link to download this on our site. Shortly thereafter, we had a Zeekly user contact us because they had found the following in Alexa’s privacy policy (in capital letters):

“NOTE: ALEXA’S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES INFORMATION ABOUT THE WEB PAGES YOU VIEW. IN SOME CASES, INFORMATION COLLECTED BY THE TOOLBAR SERVICE MAY BE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE, BUT PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT AT ALEXA, AND WE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ANALYZE WEB USAGE DATA TO DETERMINE THE IDENTITY OF ANY ALEXA USER.”

The privacy policy later went on to state, “Although this information may contain some personally identifiable information, Alexa does not use it to determine the identity of individual users or correlate it to your email address or other personally identifiable information that you give us or our affiliates, except as required by subpoenas, court orders, or other legal requirements.”

As we know from the leaked NSA documents, the NSA is highly interested in obtaining metadata. Clearly, from Alexa’s privacy policy (can be found here: http://www.alexa.com/help/privacy), Alexa is collecting complete metadata on all of your internet activity and storing it in a database. In other words, they are recording a history of everywhere you go on the internet.

Obviously, we removed this from our site immediately, and let our users know about the discovery. We’re not saying Alexa is a bad company or doing anything wrong (this is perfectly legal activity). But this is exactly the type of data the NSA is interested in obtaining, and if they gave Alexa a FISA court order to turn it all over, they would be required to do it. Additionally, as we know now, Alexa would be required to keep this a secret from it’s users. So, the point here is that if you care about your privacy, you don’t want to use any product that records your private web searching. Personally, until all of this information came out in June about the NSA, I would have assumed that Alexa’s collection of this type of data was “anonymous” and separated from “me” as an individual. Clearly they are stating in their privacy policy this is not the case, and we already know the government is using this type of data to profile individuals.

This is the point to take away from this article: If you care about having privacy on the internet, you have to be very careful about loading any software on your computer or web browser. Over the years, I have seen many different “toolbars” and browser add ons that load when you download software. So, as noted in prior articles, do your homework, read the fine print (privacy policy and terms of use agreements for any software you use), and you’ll be OK.

As I was writing this article, it also struck me that maybe all of us need to take a look at what is installed on our computers. After all, many of the things on there for most of us were put there long before we found out about the NSA using the internet to spy on us.  I’m sure there are a few toolbars and add ons we’ve all forgotten about.

So, What’s on your computer?