I read on another blog that Google is merging it's 'view' of the world. They announced it, up front -- but they did it in a way that made it sound nice - oh, we're making sure that you have the same privacy protections across all of our products. Only it turns out that what they're actually doing is merging their information gathering across all of those products, so that everything they know about you goes into one place, and then feeding that comprehensive view to their advertising stream, so that the ads that they inflict on, say, Blogger will be affected by what they saw you reading on Google Reader, or watching on YouTube, or sending emails about through GMail, or discussing on Google+ . One big information gathering tool.
I just switched my default search engine to Bing. Maybe it isn't as good as Google, and for sure it won't give me the panoply of responses that Google would, but anything I can do to spit in the face of that juggernaut, I will. And I changed my user name for Google Reader to something unique - one that isn't used elsewhere. Not much, I know, but - well, I do what I can.
Incidentally, I saw a reference on Bill's Journal to a free product called Do Not Track. Here is some info. Looks interesting.
2 comments:
It'll be interesting to see how all this pans out.
My impression is that its not as horrible as it could be, but just the possibility of what they COULD do scares me. Then again, if I knew what was common known about me now, and to whom, it'd likely stun me.
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