  As already noted, information about a user’s search queries is collected by search engine companies as well as by many different kinds of “information merchants” in the commercial sphere. Halpern (2011, 8) notes that there are approximately 500 companies that are able to track all of our online movements, thereby “mining the raw material of the Web and selling it to…data mining companies.” Pariser (2011) points out that in tracking our activities, Google’s uses fifty-seven signals—