How Startpage helps you be anonymous
More and more people are choosing to remain anonymous on the Internet in order to protect their privacy – and there are good reasons for this! As soon as you connect to the Internet, you leave traces. Your IP address, your live location, your operating system, your device, and of course all your online activities such as clicks, scrolling behavior, and purchases reveal a lot about you.
When Big Tech collects your personal data, it opens the door for personalized and targeted advertising, price trackers, and more.
However, the disclosure of your data can also have more serious consequences: Criminals can steal your identity and use it for their own purposes. There are already a lot of helpful tools to counteract this. Startpage is one of them. But how exactly does Startpage do it with anonymity and how does it protect you in addition to anonymous search?
Search anonymously
Every time you search with Startpage, we remove all personal information such as IP address, device, and browser history. We process your search query completely anonymously using Google’s search technology. No personal or identifying information about you is passed on – Google only sees Startpage, not you. Reliable and non-profiled search results are then fed back to you. The result: Completely non-profiled search results that provide all users with the same information.
Would you like to learn more about how Startpage works? Our goal is to help you clearly understand data privacy and how Startpage works. Here’s a quick overview of how Startpage works, keeps your search private, and how it comes to non-private search engines.
Browse anonymously
Do you want to search AND browse in private? Then you should definitely try our “Anonymous View.” This feature allows you to visit and explore websites without leaving a trace.
This is how it works: You enter your search query as usual. When you’ve found a search result that you want to visit, click the little mask icon for “Anonymous View.” You’ll find the mask icon next to each search result. The website will then open immediately with Startpage’s data protection. You remain completely anonymous, neither your IP address nor your user ID or other information will be transmitted. In other words, nobody can identify you. The website only sees that it is being visited by Startpage.
No matter what web pages you visit from there, you stay in Anonymous View. By the way, this is especially exciting when you compare prices. Because if the online shops don’t recognize you, they can’t adjust their prices to your browsing and buying habits.
How do you know you’re still protected by Anonymous VIew? The blue frame of Startpage around your browser window shows you that the anonymous view is activated and that you are really looking at the website while protecting your privacy. So you can surf relaxed and be sure that your identity and your personal data are completely masked. You can find more information about our Anonymous View here.
Share social stories anonymously
Over a billion people use Instagram to exchange information about global and current events and share their private photos and stories. But! Instagram is one of the biggest data thieves among social networks. According to a current overview by Statista, over 79 percent of the data collected on Instagram is sold to third parties.
That’s why we’re using Instagram to start a conversation about why protecting personal data online is more important than ever and to show simple ways of regaining control of your own data. The “Go Private” filter anonymizes people’s faces and photos with the help of a futuristic pixelation style, making it possible to share stories and pictures on Instagram without showing one’s face.
Because not only website tracking and data mining are a threat to our privacy. With the help of facial recognition technology, your face can be scanned, logged, and recorded by traffic cameras, shops, airports, and your own social media accounts. Some time ago, the company Clearview caused an uproar, which had analyzed billions of portrait photos from social media to develop a face recognition app that can identify anyone. They had made their analyzes available to law enforcement authorities in the USA, among other things, in order to identify suspicious persons. But the software was also used in many European countries and images of people living in Germany were illegally collected on the Internet to feed the database.
The “Reclaim Your Face” initiative is an amalgamation of various European organizations that want to prevent this development before it becomes the norm. Here you can find out more about the campaign and sign the petition. In the US, Fight for the Future has been leading campaigns against facial recognition on college campuses, stores, and music festivals. To sign on to their campaign and see where facial recognition is happening, check out Ban Facial Recognition.
Get your webcam cover now
With Startpage you search anonymously – and so that your camera is also safe from prying eyes, we will give you a brand new webcam cover! Just write us an email to privacyplease@startpage.com and answer the following question: Why is anonymity on the Internet important to you? The webcam cover will be sent to the first 50 people!
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