Searchprivacy.co

The Searchprivacy.co domain is the official search engine that comes with the SearchPrivacy browser extension. The SearchPrivacy browser extension may arrive on your PC as a tool inside a free software package. SearchPrivacy is promoted as an extension that can deliver a secure connection to the Internet and incognito search capability to your normal browser mode. Web surfers that install the SearchPrivacy extension will not need to go into the incognito/private browsing mode of their browser. At Searchprivacy.co users are promised to receive upgrades that include no ad re-targeting, hidden search queries, no tracking cookies, and no search history logging. The SearchPrvacy software is not open source, and its developers need to make money to pay for the server costs at least. You may want to read the privacy policy of the SearchPrivacy software and read section four that discusses how your searches are processed.

Section four is titled 'How do we use this data?' and there is just one sentence saying your online behavior is tracked to provide advertisements. That may come as a surprise since you were promised that your Internet activity is encrypted, and the SearchPrivacy extension makes sure you are not followed by advertisers. Security researchers reveal that the SearchPrivacy extension is a browser hijacker that uses Searchprivacy.co to collect your search terms and display advertisements in the form of in-text hyperlinks to recommended products and affiliated pages. Contrary to what you were lead to believe, the SearchPrivacy browser hijacker can use persistent cookies and interpret the Meta tags of the pages you browse to generate custom-made promotions. The SearchPrivacy browser hijacking application may edit your Registry and change the functionality of your Start Menu search bar and Omnibox so that you are redirected to Searchprivacy.co whenever you input keywords. The SearchPrivacy browser hijacker may install its files in the Temp directory and work in portable mode. SearchPrivacy may not be listed in the 'Control Panel' and you may need to use a credible anti-spyware instrument to delete it safely.