… not to destroy the One Ring, but to join up with Sauron. How exactly does this qualify as “non-evil”? On the contrary, outside of government, this is about as evil as it gets on the Internet. Universal tracking across all Google sites and products with no opt-out?
D., who sent the link, added that he googled “f**k you Google” and got 41 million hits. 🙂
For safe, private searching, StartingPage.com and DuckDuckGo.com are your friends.
If you must use Google for anything (I still find Google’s YouTube and image searches very useful), go to your browser’s cookie management window and delete cookies as soon as you’ve finished your site visit. (On Firefox, it’s Edit –> Preferences –> Privacy.)
And use the BetterPrivacy add-on to remove flash cookies.
I don’t know the procedures for other browsers (other than Opera, whose cookie-management leaves a lot to be desired). Maybe IE users, Safari users, etc. can add that info to the comment section.
new phrase for us freedomnistas:
f**k you google = foogled (foogle singular)
🙂
There’s also http://www.startpage.com – seem to be the same thing. Not sure. I see that it’s powered by Google, but claims never to record your IP address and uses HTTPS links versus HTTP. I’ve been using it at home and work for months and really like it.
Today, I order my family’s subscription to BHM.
I’ve used the add-on CookieCuller for years to upchuck all my normal cookies upon firefox startup. You can also use it to delete cookies at any time, and save cookies from session to session that directly benefit you, like maybe forum login cookies.
I use a bash function to remove flash cookies and DOM storage on my machine. I’d paste it here but I’m not sure if comments will choke on the code.
You might want to run this bash command:
hxxp://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/9358/see-whos-using-dom-storage-aka-web-storage-super-cookies
to see if BetterPrivacy takes care of DOM storage. It’s not obvious from the description that they do. Yes, HTML5 seems to have introduced yet another form of “super cookie” that many users are totally unaware of.
Maybe Google is just a government front.
D.
Standard Mischief — sigh. Always some new privacy threat we need to be on the lookout for. Thanks for the heads-up.
Nearly everything I found on DOM storage is directed at techies. Neither the descriptions nor the remedies (assuming a remedy is needed) are accessible to us ordinary folk.
I did find info indicating that BetterPrivacy does, or at least can, remove DOM cookies:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Internet-Applications-Addons/Mozilla-Extensions/BetterPrivacy.shtml
And I did find some relatively easy instructions for eliminating DOM storage in IE and Firefox:
http://securitygarden.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-disable-dom-storage-cookies.html
The Firefox procedures were scary looking but actually simple to carry out.
I also note in Firefox that there’s a checkbox (Edit –> Preferences –> Advanced –> Network) “Tell me when a website asks to store data for offline use” and a field that shows what sites have stored such data (0 on my system).
Despite reading as much of the tech-oriented description as my brain would handle, it’s still not clear to me how DOM storage is being used in practice and how hidden it actually is from us users.
JS — Yep, good point on StartPage. Same company; if I understand correctly, StartPage and StartingPage were originally slightly different in function, then became one.
On BHM … great idea. 🙂 I’m not sure whether subscribing now will get you the next issue (the March/April issue, which comes out in early February). If not, you might be able to pick it up on a newsstand. Not that anyone but my mother would care, but I did the cover illustration and have the lead article (a first for me and BHM) and did dunno-how-many illustrations for the inside. It’s not a freedomista article, but deals with the end of the world as (not) predicted by the Maya.
I’m excited to start getting them Claire and I will catalog them at our cabin. Perfect fit. Can’t wait to read your article. Loved the SWAT article. Although the visions of those cats, … well, *chills*. I plan on adding the recent and the past BHM issue too. I wonder if I order the 2 year special, if they’d swap the Emergency Guide for the Pantry book as I already have the emergency book. I’ll ask when ordering.
The folks at Google seem to be trapped into the Progressive mind set. It’s not that govt is “evil”, so long as the right people are in charge. Thus the Google folks having dinner with Obama, etc.
Google also is a target of opportunity, just like Microsoft was, for “anti-trust” prosecution. Google might very well not consider it evil to try to abide the “anti-trust” rules (as if there are any), since there are Really Good Reasons such rules exist.
Google’s records are, again, another target of opportunity. Their entire business revolves around finding patterns in people’s information habits in order to sell targeted advertizing. Those patterns, Gmail, Calendar, etc., what NSA spook or JustUs dept prosecutor isn’t looking for every opportunity to get their hooks into that data stream? What politician isn’t bombarded daily with reports from the bureaucracy that say things like, “If only we had that data, we could ….”?
The NSA and its fore-bearers has been copying off every data stream into and out-of the US since the first sea cables were laid. The fact that AT&T even squeeked about it being “unconstitutional” a few years ago was an aberration, they’ve been actively complicit just like every other telecommunications company. Cisco didn’t help the government of China build the Great Firewall out of nowhere, cooperating with governments is what allows them to stay in business at all.
While many of us computer types are hard-bitten individualists, there are also many who fall into the Pretense of Knowledge trap, that govt can do good if managed by the right people (or the right supercomputer).
And sadly, whether complicity and cooperation is evil or not depends entirely on which side of the Mountains of Shadow one stands.
FYI:
All “StartingPage” search results include a proxy link,
“View by Ixquick Proxy,” which prevents your own ISP from seeing
or recording where you have gone on the internet. Everything is
already HTTPS incrypted, so this keeps your ISP from storing your
Internet usage or data.
You can bookmark pages accessed through the proxy as well, which
is handy for pages you access often.
Regi
Regi