If Google isn’t Big Brother they’re doing a pretty good imitation. And escaping them is no easier than getting away from the Thought Police was for Winston. Once you understand how Google Web History works you’ll have a pretty good idea how all the others who are following us around work.
SOCIAL MEDIA PRIVACY:
LATEST GOOGLE PRIVACY ISSUE LINKS:
- Google Knows Where I Am and Everything Else I Do
- Google’s User Data Empire
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES on PROTECTING YOUR INTERNET PRIVACY:
- Six Tips to Protect Your Online Privacy
- Hello to Less Privacy – private cameras could be almost anywhere
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES on GOOGLE WEB SEARCH and Other Forms of GOOGLE TRACKING:
- Google’s Chrome – Even More Evil Big Brother – links to numerous articles on Chrome
- Google Claims Ownership of Everything You Create Using Chrome from emails to blog posts to Web sites. The public immediately outed the Chrome EULA (End User Legal Agreement) as incredibly greedy – even for Google – and Google immediately retracted it as an innocent Google EULA mistake. (Are you starting to see a pattern here?)
- Big Brother Google is Tracking You – One user shares graphs showing her Internet usage (which is not accurate by the way if you leave multiple tabs or windows open for hours on end).
- Google and Other Search Engines Are Tracking Your Every Move – If you don’t read any other links do check this one out. It starts out simple to understand and straight to the point and then offers some ways to escape being followed.
- Google Almost Has a Monopoly on US! – Plenty of easy to understand information on what Google is doing and why many have concerns with it.
- Gray Wolf: Google Web History: More Spying From Google – comments from one of the sharpest of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) bloggers – and a brilliant man of integrity too.
- Google Patents Detecting, Tracking and Targeting Kids
- Bug in Google Desktop Forces You To Give Data to the Borg – More from GrayWolf to help us all notice that Google is not the innocent “Don’t be evil” folks they claim to be.
- Tim Anderson’s ITWriting: Why I’m Not Using Google Web History
- Google Web History? I’ll Pass, Thanks
- Wirelessness Thoughts on Google Web History – Contains short descriptions of various Google offerings and some of their privacy issues. Don’t miss his insights on gmail tying you to a phone number. (I predict free Google phones are coming.)
- Google Web History and How to Turn It Off – see comments section for posts regarding Google enabling Web History even if you did NOT enable it. That information has been deleted (or possibly moved somewhere I haven’t found yet) from the official Google FAQ
- Google Web History for Bookmarking and Monitoring
- Google Web History: Give Google Your Entire Browsing History
- Google Cuts Data Retention Time in Half
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON ONLINE DATA MINING:
- EFF Suing AT&T for Spying to Sue Government Too
WHO ELSE IS TRACKING YOU AND YOUR VISITORS?:
- Beware: Big Brother is Here – on the dangers of storing everything online
- Using MyBlogLog Could Get You Banned From AdSense
- Yahoo Owns MyBlogLog – Google Owns AdSense
- If Google Can’t Count Why Would I Count On Them
COMPETITORS OR?:
- Open Yahoo! Will Play Nice With Google, Not Compete
- AT&T and IBM Swap Divisions (Employees of each lose pensions and receive pay cuts.)
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Gail Gardner
Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap
Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers.
After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends.
Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.
Spooky stuff that Google is following us and tracking us everywhere we browse on the net, I guess its something we have to live with!
Shocking to think that an organization knows more about you then your own damn government. Shocking.
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From this post I can image that Google is too much intelligent and it is working on the algorithms of artificial intelligence.
I know what it does but how does Google Web History actually work? I’m tired of looking and can’t find anything on this.
For example, I use Internet Explorer but have Chrome installed in case a virus disables IE. Today I opened Chrome and to my surprise it had in its history 3 months of sites visited in IE (which by the way is configured to keep only 3 weeks of history).
I know it was Google Web History that did this and already removed it from my Google account, but what process is running on the computer and what exactly does it monitor? All http comunications?
Thanks!
What none of us know is how many entities share information between themselves, how much tracking of our movements across unrelated sites is going on, and who is saving what data.
If Google Chrome is showing what you do in IE, then Google and Microsoft are making it even more obvious that they ARE sharing data.
The sad news is unless we are so technical that we are familiar with every bit of code on our PCs how can we ever really know what might be running – especially if it is coded to not appear in the running processes that are visible?
And how can we know what is tracking our activities? If we opt-out of something how do we ever know that they actually DID opt us out? We don’t know.
I set up an email program to delete my email on the server at inbox.com but it never deletes. Different privacy laws apply if you allow your email to stay on a server, but the bottom line is we are NOT in control.
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Yep, there is a lot going on with our information that we don’t know about. But the more we know how it works, the more we can do something about it. Like blocking specific programs and not allowing cookies for specific sites.
lately i have noticed that what i did in chrome shows us up in firefox..i clear history before shutting down..does this help?
Wny, I doubt it will help with keeping google from sharing information of what you are doing with others and vice versa. That history that you clear is only for you and has nothing to do with the information that companies like Google store about you.
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That was a very good read. Thank you very much for sharing and I will definitely check back for more.
Google uses approximately all the information for better improvement of the landing pages and its other products, so i think its quite useful for all.
Thanks for the information.
I was reading one of the articles when i came to the “scroogle” program. I think it is fantastic if you are really worried about Google or other search engines logging your search queries to your IP address.
Thanks for all the sources, i never viewed Google like this, its nice to see another opinion. It makes you think twice before you do anything on the internet these days.
Thanks for the post! This one’s a bit of an eye opener, thanks again.
Welcome Samantha,
I hope you skimmed some of the six other posts on privacy.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..Intelligent Bloggers to Consider Reading =-.