What Happens When Doing an Online Internet Search - Tech and Privacy

Latest update: February 3, 2024. Page URL indicates original publication date; meanwhile, times change and the updates continue.

Do not do an online search for your debit or credit card account numbers. Actually the following description of what happens applies to any and all search terms you may happen to enter in most search engines.

Epic Fail!

MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express ( AMEX ), etc.

This website has discovered people are doing that. I'm guessing people do so in an attempt to see if their credit or debit card numbers have been stolen and are being posted online. Unfortunately, by searching online for your card number, you have just made your credit and/or debit card account number available to any website you then happen to land on; the website owner now has your card number.

Here's What Happens When You Do a Search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Any Other Search Engine

Sequence

1. You do a search for your credit or debit card account number (or anything else for that matter).
2. A list of search results comes up.
3. You click on one or more of the results.
4. Now here is where the problems start... The vast majority of website owners automatically track what search terms bring people to their websites; they do this for perfectly benign and legitimate search-engine-optimization-related reasons. Your card number was the search term bringing you to the website and so is nicely displayed to the website owner along with all the other more usual search terms being recorded by the site. Now if you landed on an honest website, then your account number is simply ignored. But if you landed on a dishonest website who is looking for these kind of numbers...

Dishonest websites use hacker/SEO techniques to attract you to click on their websites. If you do so, grief follows.

Be wise, do not look for your credit or debit card account numbers online. And as a side note and needless to say, the same applies to your social security number and all other sensitive data. And the website you landed on is not the only entity that now has your search term(s). Search engines now have them as well.

Online credit card account number searches are a bad idea...

It should be mentioned that many search engines track, store, and analyze virtually every search phrase that is entered into their sites. Many times, the search engines will turn around and make that information available to others; this includes algorithmically displaying it online to the general public. This information can also be sold/given to any and all government agencies and private companies. Google has become famous for this kind of privacy invasion; frankly, I now mostly use the other search engines these days. And, as generally known, people know that your search history is also stored in your browser; not a bad idea to clear that out every once in a while.

Please share this page so as to help others. The more people who are knowledgeable, the better off we all are. We really do live in a fishbowl society these days.

- End of Public Service Message -

Re: Using Mobile?
Home: site intro and featured articles/resources.
View Web Version: displays Main Menu article categories (will be located below), additional site info (below and side), search function, translation function.