  If Berners-Lee, Hinman, and others are correct, it would seem that we have much to worry about indeed as we go forward trying to preserve our basic freedoms in a democracy, while at the same time taking advantage of many of the personalizing- and customizing-based features that search engines such as Google now offer us. It would also seem that increased transparency on the part of search engine companies could would be an important step in helping us to alleviate some of these concerns. But who, exactly, should be responsible for regulating search engine companies and for holding them accountable? We examine these and related questions in Section 4. First, however, we briefly consider some ethical issues, particularly cyber-security related concerns, that arise because of a relatively new kind of search engine that is capable of “discovering” the location of “things” (objects) via the Internet.