Verizon Launches ‘Privacy’ Search Engine, To Great Skepticism

Just four years ago, the telecommunications and internet giant Verizon was forced to pay a fine of $1.35 million to the FCC, for inserting “supercookies” into users' online data that would track the online activities of the company’s own customers all over the internet—without telling them.  Now, Verizon wants internet users to trust the company to protect their privacy, rather than continually violate it, launching a new search engine designed to compete with Google. Unlike that dominant search engine, Verizon claims that its new service, OneSearch, will not use trackers to record users online activity.  Such trackers from Google, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook have been detected on sites across the internet, including about 75 percent of all porn sites, according to one recent study. The search service also guards user’s search histories, and does not assemble “profiles” of users based on their search requests.  “You can search the internet with increased confidence, knowing your personal and search data isn't being tracked, stored, or shared with advertisers,” Verizon said in a statement, quoted by the tech site Motherboard.  Verizon’s new search engine is actually just new privacy infrastructure built over results that are provided the the existing search engine Bing, owned by Microsoft, according to Motherboard. But Verizon’s promises to protect user privacy have been greeted with skepticism, given the company’s checkered history of covertly hoovering up customer data. As the British site The Register reported, in 2014 the telecom mega-firm was hit with a $7.4 million FCC fine for “its failure to tell customers that it was using their personal information for marketing purposes.” And in 2018, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden accused Verizon of selling information the locations of users’ phones to third-party companies which then resold the data to police, and to large corporations. The data was then used in some instances by law enforcement to keep tabs on  judges and law enforcement officials, and by financial institutions to secretly check the locations of credit card applicants.  “Not only has Verizon been a major player in numerous consumer privacy scandals, it has worked tirelessly to ensure that the government can’t hold it accountable for any of them,” Motherboard wrote, citing the firm’s lobbying efforts against FCC privacy rules and other oversight regulations. How well the new search engine will received remains open to question, as well. Verizon has recently attempted to launch its own app store, and even a YouTube-style streaming service, but neither managed to gain traction in the marketplace. Photo By OneSearch Screen Capture