  Some of the technological breakthroughs that occurred during the “early Web” era of search engine development helped to make possible two kinds of privacy-related ethical issues examined in Section 3. First, the vast amount of online  information about ordinary people that became accessible to Web-based search engines during this era made it possible for those people to become the “targets” of online searches conducted by anyone who had access to the Internet; this concern is examined in  Section 3.2. Second, the practice of aggregating personal information, which was being routinely collected by major search engine companies and their advertisers, contributed significantly to the data-mining-related privacy issues that are examined in Section 3.3.