Tag: privacy

If you’ve been following my Twitter or Facebook accounts you know that I’m more than mildly alarmed by their cavalier attitude towards privacy. Let it not be said that I unfairly and blindly focus on one target. I use far more Google services than I do Facebook, and they’ve had many more years of practice at collecting and collating personal information.

I will occasionally go through a privacy binge and find things to remove from my account. For those of you of a like mind, I found this thoughtfully put together article on Computerworld: The smart paranoid’s guide to using Google.

There’s some generic stuff in there about blocking ads. Overall, I have no issue with ads on the web, because they’re the only thing keeping it free. However, these ads do track our behaviour and build identifiable profiles, so it may be worthwhile using a browser plugin to block them.

Likewise, you may want to review exactly what Google is remembering about your searches:

Google uses this information for a number of benign purposes, such as fine-tuning its search algorithms and determining wider patterns in Web searches for its Google Trends page. But however useful it is to the company, it’s probably a safe bet that you don’t want anyone to see every search you’ve ever done.

I strongly recommend a good read, and applying at least some of the recommendations.

Source: Lifehacker