How Do I Keep My Privacy While Using Google? 533
hubert.lepicki writes "I use Google all the time. I keep two GMail tabs open when I'm online (one is private, another is a corporate account), I use Google search, and recently I switched to the Chromium browser. Google's services are fast, easy to use and usually reliable. At the same time, I know Google is tracking everything I do; I can see it in search results or their ads on web pages, which tend to match my interests. After the recent post by Mozilla's community director suggesting Bing has a better privacy policy (a response to questionable comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt), I started to... 'google' ways of keeping my private data safe while browsing and using Google services. The results weren't very helpful, so I ask you, Slashdotters: how do I stay anonymous to Google while using their services?"
Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
Same IP address at the same time...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but that's not really going to be reliable, is it ? For them, I mean. Do they have their intelligence into IP address space allocation so far advanced that they'll be able to tell the difference between an individually held IP address and one that's doin' a whole lot a nattin' ?
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Is just what IP tracking is for. You can have all the IM and browsers you want, over time the database logs 'you' and your friends once a set of "dictionary" words are tripped.
Every search and IM is now "Signals intelligence" to the gov and marketing to the
Or you can sell the 'data' to the gov too while running a marketing front
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
They do have extra info - flash cookies. I can safely bet 99% of you never remember to clear them, and for example Gmail/Google's services explicitly uses them to match IP changes (or use of proxies) with a single computer.
Funny thing is their ToS "Google may store cookies" probably covers flash cookies too, even if everybody would think they wouldn't use such tactics. And who said Google is not evil?
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Blocking Flash should be the default for anyone concerned about privacy, anyway. And with the BetterPrivacy Firefox add-on can in addition clear your Flash cookies between browser sessions, so even for things like YouTube where you absolutely need Flash the tracking ability is at least reduced (of course you'll have to regularly close the browser for it to be effective).
Re:Ideas (Score:4, Informative)
(of course you'll have to regularly close the browser for it to be effective).
FYI, the Better Privacy plugin can delete flash cookies based on age so you do not have to restart the browser to get the benefit - I have mine set to delete any that are over 1 hour old.
Re:Ideas NOT IP -- proxy servers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely they could see that you're coming from a residential connection and compensate.
Re:Ideas NOT IP -- proxy servers (Score:4, Informative)
Some people won't believe you (and it's argued in the replies also), but yes any sort of identification by IP is pretty much useless, and it has been for years. It wasn't so bad for geolocating, but even then it ran into serious problems. Even Google, the behemoth datamining company, would sometimes send me off to google.ca, even though I was happily sitting in the US.
They *CAN* use that information to associate you to a group of users. Some people have mentioned NAT on residential connections. Residential lines sometimes show up at small business sites, so even with some regex matching, it wouldn't identify if it's a single user house, or a 10+ user business. Then again, they can guess based on browser usage.
A long time ago, at a company I worked for, we tried to use IP's as part (not all) of the user identification. It's all fine and dandy, until you find out that some places (namely AOL) are obnoxious about their proxies, and some users have multiple lines. One of my original problem was the users with multiple dialup accounts. They'd get annoyed at the speed with one, and switch.
Even a user with a whole collection of dialup and broadband accounts won't be protected if they're searching for "bad" things. The IP is still identifiable to someone. If the feds start subpoenaing records, it won't matter which line you were on, they're still your line. If you're at work and doing it, don't believe for a second that your employer won't be compelled to hand over every machine in the place if necessary. And, no, stealing a WiFi connection from your neighbor isn't enough to protect you. If you've done something bad enough, and the feds show up, they'll figure out soon enough that grandma wasn't really looking for bomb making materials online, and they'll figure out who the rogue user is attached to her access point.
The larger your organization is, the less likely you'll know they're on to you before there's a nice man with handcuffs and a badge standing at your cube saying "We need to talk. Come with us."
So, the question then becomes, how much are you worried about what you're searching for online, and should you really be doing it? The IP may not be any good for positive identification, but it leads them down the trail right to you.
Re:Ideas NOT IP -- proxy servers (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god for IPv6 ?
I had no part in that, and I resent the accusation.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
Same IP address at the same time...
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something about the nature of networking, but isn't anyone behind a NAT gateway or proxy going to be coming from the "same IP address at the same time"? I do believe that's one of the reasons they came up with cookies in the first place, to differentiate multiple users originating from the same IP address.
So, as the grandparent suggests, if you use one web browser for Google queries and either reject all cookies in that browser or at the very least never log in to any Goog
I search for random stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I think my current profile must be for a pro-abortion conservative seeking vegetarian recopies for well aged beef, who is also looking for gun rights for married homosexuals who want to club baby seals to cut down on green house gasses, so that they can drive their Hummers as much as they like to anti-tax Tea Parties where they can dump their toxic CFL bulbs by the eco-friendly re-usable shopping bag-full. And, I may or may not have breast canc
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were a paranoid person I wouldn't bother with the installing, formatting and reinstalling. I'd just use a livecd
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Try Optimize Google [optimizegoogle.com] instead. It's a far more actively maintained fork.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
This is like a steer asking, "how can I keep getting this free food and board without being taken to the slaughter house later?"
To Google, you are the product. They are selling advertising. More specifically, they are selling your attention to marketers. Giving you privacy is contradictory to the entire purpose of their existence. They give you nice, fast, free stuff to keep you hooked in to their services and to keep collecting more data so that they can sell more advertising.
There is no privacy using Google services. There never will be. They will keep encroaching into your private info as far as you let them.
Re:Ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
This is like a steer asking, "how can I keep getting this free food and board without being taken to the slaughter house later?"
Unfortunately when the steer emails aunty Daisy, who lives in a paddock in another country, and she writes back, she also gets taken to the slaughter house later.
This is my biggest issue with Google: I can control my own use of their services, but I can't control the drones around me who have all flocked to GMail as rapidly as they can. Even my alma mater has started using Google docs/apps/whatever and GMail to replace its old email system.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I run my own email server for privacy and educational reasons. Spamhaus has gotten into bed with big companies and they tell everyone to ignore all email from anyone using a cable modem. You're on the public block list not because you sent spam, but because of your IP.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Spread the confusion by always killing your cookies and use different browsers.
But personally I run my own mail server and use only Google for searching.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's a build of Chrome without all the privacy-infringing "features."
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I've thought about this problem and I've also read about TrackMeNot. Unfortunatly, TrackMeNot has some serious flaws:
1. It randomizes search terms instead of following believable search patterns. Example 'search stream': Shoes, virus protection, Hannah Montana, flamethrower "do it yourself", Hawaii, spark plugs, military surplus, speaker system, Exhaust Flame Thrower Kits... It's pretty easy to see what's real and what's fake.
2. People tend to use search engines in bursts. When I last used TrackMeNot it sent off search queries at regular intervals. The decoy queries would be easy to filter out.
3. Nobody would really be willing to let queries like "donkey sex" or "how to kill the president" get fired off by the software. For true privacy, those would be the most important terms to make the list, so that if someone really *did* search for those, he could just say that it was the software making automatic requests.
I had an idea to fix this:
1. The software would have to monitor your search engine usage and match your searching bursts and searching frequency. Those things can't be hardwired into the software or else algorithms would so some fingerprint-matching on your search queries.
The next part is a little fuzzy:
2a. For every 'search burst' you make, the software can ananomously post the search terms to a central server that other clients read and use as decoys. The problem is filtering out truly private data such as address and names.
2b. If not that, maybe the software can just go loose on the web and look up possible related search terms to search for.
Of course, I'm thinking beyond simple privacy against advertisers. More like legal protection.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm [scroogle.org]
Good stuff.
more Scroogle (Score:3, Informative)
Search engine plug-in for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12506 [mozilla.org]
Re:Ideas (Score:4, Informative)
Congratulations, you just ran whois on a porn site instead of scroogle.org. Thanks for offering your authoritative opinion.
Scroogle.org, which is the actual search-engine proxy in question, has been operated by Daniel Brandt [counterpunch.org] for the last 6 years or so.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful with TrackMeNot - I used it for awhile, and Google started blocking my real searches, returning an error screen that indicated my searches may not be legitimate. They clearly know when you are using it (who sends in dozens of searches every hour of the day?), and may consider it a violation of their TOS. I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
Well, that's your problem right there. No online service should be treated as a backup system, nor should you allow yourself to become totally dependent upon it. Period. Store your stuff on your own equipment, and burn it to a disc now and then if it's that important. I don't trust Google or any other corporation that offers free services to be there tomorrow: remember, anything free is worth exactly what you paid for it. Take steps to preserve your data: that's your responsibility, not Google's.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Funny)
Wow!
Your post is so specific and yet almost completely unhelpful at the same time.
Re:Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
If you asked me... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you asked me I would say resistance is futile unless you are ready to commit illegal actions.
You could always use anonymous services like scroogle fro searching but if I was a intelligence gathering organization, I would run such "anonymous services" myself so there is a risk that you might be followed even more by using such services.
Hacking into 10 machines and forwarding your connections through all of them might be a solution that will get you into trouble but that can be an efficient way to stay anonymous. But then again, intelligence gathering organizations might set up honey pots that you will end up using and you will bring even more attention to yourself this way.
So anyway:
> how do I stay anonymous to Google while using their services
is a really hard to answer question: There might be solutions for anonymous services like searching but for gmail and all other services that require you to log in, I would say forget it.
Intelligence gathering organizations have come to fully realize the potential of the Internet to track people, in contrast to the situation in the early 90s. Maybe Google CEO knows all about this and that he was just saying; you will be tracked anyway so you may as well be tracked by us ! He kind of screwed up on this because he is now stuck, unable to further explain his point of view, he would have to admit that Google, Bing and many other track you for business and marketing reasons but that they also "share" information with security oriented intelligence gathering organizations.
So in the end, I would choose who I want to be tracked by for marketing purposes and forget about not being tracked for other purposes unless you want to risk getting into trouble. You may be safer just acting as a normal day to day user thus making the amount of traffic play into your advantage in order to stay anonymous.
Privacy is the next killer ap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What exactly are these illegal actions you're talking about? Using other people's WiFi? Sneaking onto other people's computers? I'm honestly curious as to what you meant.
Re: (Score:2)
If you asked me I would say resistance is futile unless you are ready to commit illegal actions.
How do you know you aren't committing illegal actions [youtube.com]?
Re:If you asked me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For those really interested in privacy, maintaining a benign online personality is important.
The absence of one could raise questions, while you can use innocent patterns to suggest innocence.
The moral is that smart people should not MIX their personalities and communication traffic.
TrackMeNot (Score:5, Interesting)
Look up the TrackMeNot Firefox extension. It spams Google and the other search engines with randomly generated but plausible search queries, so there's no real way that any of these companies can build a profile on you. If you browse with ads, however, prepare for some really bizarre ones.
Re:TrackMeNot (Score:5, Informative)
"If you browse with ads, however, prepare for some really bizarre ones."
No problem. I Googled "blocking Google Ads" then set Firefox accordingly. :)
http://www.lancelhoff.com/blocking-google-adsense-ads/ [lancelhoff.com]
Why not... (Score:2, Informative)
Why not... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That was the problem--he should have used bing [bing.com].
Tor? (Score:5, Informative)
Why not use Tor for search queries? Your gmail is obviously a different story, because using Tor wouldn't make much difference for Google. So set Opera or Chrome to use Tor, and you're set for that part.
Re:Tor? (Score:5, Informative)
Or use OperaTor: http://archetwist.com/en/opera/operator [archetwist.com]
Re:Tor? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except for the fact that most Tor nodes are trojaned DoD machines, with all sorts of data->disk logging features. Or not. But how could you tell?
You don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously.. despite all the controversy it has stirred up.. if you don't have anything to hide.. who cares
It's not that black and white.. but chances are unless you have some very disturbing fetish.. chances are "the stuff you don't want your boss to know" is fairly similar to 10 million other people.. to the point where you are just a tiny blip in a stats bucket. Your just search #234521 for "sex with staplers".
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper .. they are using it to increment a counter that you might be interested in office supply ads.
If you are really paranoid though.. use adblock.. route everything through tor.. disable cookies.. and be sure to encrypt your hard-drive with a 20 gazillion bit cypher.
Re:You don't (Score:4, Funny)
where can I get one of these? I am doing lots of illegal things, and I dont want to ask Google - for obvious reasons :-)
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper ..
They are keeping it, and sharing it with secretive agencies. You may think you have nothing to hide, but you don't know which way the political wind will blow in the future. Maybe you'll be a dissident to those agencies later on...
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper ..
They are keeping it, and sharing it with secretive agencies. You may think you have nothing to hide, but you don't know which way the political wind will blow in the future. Maybe you'll be a dissident to those agencies later on...
Anyone who has studied history and actually learned from it would come to the same conclusion. I'm amazed that there is anything resembling controversy over this.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone has studied history, they'd realize that they're 1 person in the billions who have existed, and only a very, VERY small fraction of people throughout the entire history of the world have had their privacy infringed in the manner the poster is talking about. The general rule, historically speaking, is that nobody gives a crap what you're searching for and you probably think you're more important in the grand scheme of things than you really are.
Re:You don't (Score:4, Informative)
are you prepared to move out into the jungle and live outside civilization? I assume no, since you're sitting in front of a computer? then you're going to have to compromise.
Ah yes, my favorite recurring Slashdot fallacy [wikipedia.org]. I'll put it this way:
<sarcasm>Right, because we all know that you must either voluntarily submit to having your every last move logged and recorded, or, live in the jungle as a hermit and give up all civilization and all technology. Yup, no middle ground anywhere.</sarcasm>
Look, just because Google wants me to load their redirection links and accept their cookies and execute their JS doesn't mean that my browser must do those things. To the degree that obtaining my private data requires my participation, I choose not to participate. The only Google service I ever use is their search engine, so for me a reasonable level of privacy is quite easy to achieve. I wonder what you thought you were telling me that was non-trivial, as I can't find anything.
Now, can you guys maybe study argumentation and a little logic so you can stop committing these easily-refuted fallacies? It would make your contributions much more interesting and meaningful. Although, the bright side is that people like you have given me a great deal of practice at exposing and rejecting such erroneous techniques.
Re:You don't (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, no. There really is little to no middle ground in this. The internet, by its nature, is an open platform. When you are on the internet, you are going to be leaving traces, unless you go to extreme measures not to; be those traces on google computers, or in the logs of hotgoatsex.com. Of course you probably could figure out a way to use some complex series of multi-level encrypted proxies, bouncing around the world before getting to what you want, but to be honest, that's the type behavior and time investment I would expect from either a real tin-foil-hat freak, or a bot-net owner. (Tor does not count, for technical reasons that have been mentioned numerous times already)
You say that the only Google service you use is their engine. That must mean that you block every single ad tracking cookie, all the Google APIs, Google Analytics, and the loads of useful services they offer. Services, I would like to remind you, are used in more and more sites, because they give site owners important data. All this, because of a view that you, and specifically you are interesting enough to follow. Of course I do not know anything about you, but I find it quite unlikely that you show up as anything more than a tiny blip on the radar, unless you make a habit of talking about making bombs, killing presidents, or other stupid stuff such as that.
Granted, perhaps you really do take all these steps. However, let's be frank. If the government wanted to learn something about you, they would just go to your friendly neighborhood telecom oligopoly. The ISPs, after all, have long proven themselves more than ready to give out whatever data they have, for pennies per request. They already have the ready made infrastructure to track every single byte you, or anyone, send out. Google, on the other hand, does have their little "do no evil" mantra that they try to follow as much as a huge corporation can. As such, they are much more likely to demand a full warrant before sharing what they know. After all, this knowledge is their lifeblood, it would pay to keep it as secret as they can.
Regarding the idea of the slashdot fallacy that you keep pushing around, perhaps I could bring up such novel concepts as a Metaphor [wikipedia.org], Sarcasm [wikipedia.org], and even Exaggeration [wikipedia.org]. I believe those might be pertinent to the example at hand. I'm sure you can figure out that no one REALLY thinks you need to pack your bags, and move to South America. Instead, they are trying to convey the idea that by going this far out of your way to ensure what illusion of privacy you chose to maintain (Which, considering you chose to post on a message board on the internet really is not that much), you are likely missing out on some of the features that make the internet the amazingly useful tool that it is. You could almost say that you are "living in the jungle." So, yes, you could continue practicing exposing the sarcastic musings of the slashdot population, but I would argue that if this is what you were after, your time may be better spent on a debater's forum. I'm sure you could even find a few that do not use anything google yet.
Now please, don't take this as an argument for why you should use google. If you have concerns, then it is entirely within your right to try to ensure your privacy as much as you can. Instead, I am trying to illustrate that this illusion of privacy that you maintain is most likely just that, an illusion. At most, you are ensuring that one of the myriad of third parties that potentially has access to your info has a bit less than they would otherwise. Of course, I may be wrong, and you really might be an internet ninja. In that case, congratulations, you have successfully hidden data that no one would really care about anyway. Unfortunately, in doing so you probably raised some flags somewhere, and may now be significantly higher on the "to track" list than many others.
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the new Slashdot, where everything Google does is great, and only people with something to hide would care about privacy.
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
only people with something to hide would care about privacy
An entirely correct position. The place where the argument breaks down is that there's nothing wrong with having something to hide. For example, I would very much prefer it if my Slashdot password remains a secret, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not pedantic. You have something to hide: the fact that you made certain queries about porn, crypto cracking and theory. The point is that there is nothing wrong with wanting to hide that.
Re:You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the new Slashdot, where everything Google does is great, and only people with something to hide would care about privacy.
For people who don't 'get it', compare the situation to getting frisked by the police.
The principle is exactly the same, but the practical difference is that Google's invasion of privacy
causes you no inconvienence... which somehow makes it okay. Out of sight, out of mind.
Re:You don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. While the moment Google returns a search query for you, it must know what you're searching for, there's no requirement that it log that search query and associate it to you. However, Google does log everything and does store it indefinitely, also associating it all back to you, and that is the sound of your privacy being taken out back and shot repeatedly.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Welcome to the new Slashdot, where everything Google does is great, and only people with something to hide would care about privacy."
Actually, that's the old Slashdot. The new Slashdot would be one where everyone was NOT a Google fanboy and didn't have their tongues all the way up Eric Schmid's ass.
Re:You don't (Score:4, Insightful)
"Seriously.. despite all the controversy it has stirred up.. if you don't have anything to hide.. who cares"
Ah, the old "if you have nothing to hide" argument. So, we don't need any expectations of any privacy.
To the degree that you really believe what you wrote there, you are an idiot.
Re:You don't (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can probably stay somewhat anonymous. As in: they know what you do, but not that it's YOU that's doing just that.
It's like my Octopus card [wikipedia.org] used for public transport. The Octopus company knows exactly for what rides that card is used - where and when I get on or off the train, where and when I board a bus, the boats I take, the occasional newspaper or other purchase I make with it. And they keep those records for seven years.
However what they do not know is that it's me. There is no name linked to the
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess in the end I fail to see what the big deal is.
As long as Google isn't selling my financial data to unscrupulous persons and having me get billed all kinds of money for things I don't want, or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss, what's the big deal?
So what if some marketers know everything about what I like to buy or look for? How, in the end, does that really affect my life? Yes, it's a bit creepy sometimes, but it makes no impact on my quality of
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
My, my. Slashdot sure has changed.
If you let it slide that a company tracks everything you do, that then becomes the norm, and you no longer have any privacy anywhere. The opportunities for exploitation of this data are too numerous to list. You don't know whether or not Google is selling your data to unscrupulous persons, and with a CEO who says only wrongdoers have something to worry about when it comes to privacy, chances are that advertisers know all about you at this point.
Let me get this straight. It's okay for a company to index all your information so that advertisers know everything you do, but it's "scary" when a credit card company does a good thing and uses info on your driver's license as a security confirmation over the phone? Are you for real?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Odds are Google isn't sending much info about you downstream - probably none at all. They're in the business of selling ads. The metric on ads is response - whether measured by click-throughs, or resulting sales-per-dollar-invested in the advertising campaign. Google isn't in the business of selling their data on you. They're in the business of selling advertisers advertising services which may be far more efficient in effectively reaching productive customers than any other place the advertisers can spend
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
What *does* freak me out is how my credit card company can ask me to confirm my height and weight when I talk to them on the phone, and when I ask them how the f**k they found out how much I weigh, they tell me that by law they're allowed to download all the information from the Department of Transit and so they know everything that's on my drivers license. THAT's the kind of stuff that I find extremely scary, and that's the kind of thing you can't do anything at all to prevent other than living in a shack in the mountains somewhere.
But the sum of all your purchases, searches, emails ect... becomes a very accurate picture of who you are (or your behavior anyway). Google may not have nefarious intentions, but the profile now exists in a form which is not even promised to be private.
Given the experience you had with the data sharing between corporations and government, I'm surprised you don't see the potential negatives. A profile of your whole life and lives of all those around you is just a subpoena away. Maybe less than that.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real issue is a generational one --- the younger generation doesn't have the expectation of privacy that the elder ones did.
I'm 25, and I don't have anything "secret", really. I'm about as political as you can be, and I think there is a damned good chance (as those things go) that I'll be on the "list" of my own government in the future. The thing is, I don't see that there is any way to prevent being on that list without changing who I am, so I'm okay with that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss
Well, they ARE creating that dossier (they've admitted to retaining all search queries), although supposedly anonymized.
The thing is, Google may not be e-mailing it to your boss or anyone else, but since your search history is saved then there's a chance of it getting out. Maybe Google gets acquired by another company who's not interested in your privacy, maybe they get hacked, or a disgruntled ex-employee leaks it... What's the betting that it's totally anonymous anyway since as such it'd be of little use
Easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Block Javascript, block all Google cookies, have no Google accounts. Occasionally permit scripts and cookies for long enough to look at a map (oh, and also block all advertising with Privoxy).
Works for me, but I don't think I'm quite Google's idea of an ideal user (that's *user*, not *customer*).
You Don't (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are logged into gmail you cannot possibly retain your privacy.
Short of deleting all google cookies and changing your ip after using gmail you cannot retain your privacy.
Not exactly what you want, but (Score:5, Funny)
# cat > /etc/hosts ...
> google.com 127.0.0.1
> doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1
> youtube.com 127.0.0.1
> google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1
> #
> EOF
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You missed a lot of other google owned ad tracking services & blocked the sites he wants to use. There are a huge list of google ad servers. Grab the hosts file from: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm [mvps.org] they keep that updated & it'll block some of the other ad & spy stuff too.
Also make sure 'Web History' isn't enabled on your google accounts (my account page), or when you're logged out (top right corner of search results).
You have to give up some privacy as the cost of using their services
Truth is, there is no privacy anywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to 9/11 there arent anywhere on the world you can expect any privacy. Not online, not offline, not your medical records, your purchases, your bills or anything else thats in electronic form are private.
Weather you use Bing, Hotmail, Gmail, Google doesnt matter the least bit since ALL of them logs everything and have to keep it and release it at any governments whim. The differences between them are highly superficial and has zero importance in reality. The terms of service from the different vendors are worth about, not a damn thing. They have to log everything and have to release whatever a court or intelligence agency wants released.
If you dont want it read and scrutinized, dont put it online. Period.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They have to log everything
No. No they don't. If they do log it, then they may have to release it to a court or whatever, but I can say quite definitely that logging is not (yet) mandatory.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
don't trust any computer but your own if you're saavy enough to trust your computer
But if you're savvy enough to trust your own computer, then you're savvy enough to know that you can't trust your own computer...
That's why I put 4 80mm fans in it. When the little bastard tries to sneak up on me, I can hear it coming...
Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
I use my butler Jeeves for everything. He arranges my travel, does my bills, and picks up anything I need from the store. He is fast, courteous and usually reliable. At the same time I know that he is aware of everything I do; I can see it in the way he can often provide suggestions which tend to match my interests. Do to some misplaced comments of his, I am now suspicious that he may not respect my privacy. How do I remain anonymous from my butler while still having him provide all the personal services that I am accustomed to?
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
I use my butler Jeeves for everything. He arranges my travel, does my bills, and picks up anything I need from the store. He is fast, courteous and usually reliable. At the same time I know that he is aware of everything I do; I can see it in the way he can often provide suggestions which tend to match my interests. Do to some misplaced comments of his, I am now suspicious that he may not respect my privacy. How do I remain anonymous from my butler while still having him provide all the personal services that I am accustomed to?
You need a RAIB, often redundantly described as a RAIB array.
"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Butlers"
The worst privacy problem is cross correlating otherwise innocent isolated activities. Using multiple butlers prevents them from cross correlating. Of course, they may collude behind your back.
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
It's funny you should mention Jeeves, since the site formerly known as Ask Jeeves [ask.com] actually has better options for privacy (see the "AskEraser" feature in the upper right).
Re: (Score:3)
I use my butler Jeeves for everything.
Now, if only Google would sign the same confidentiality agreement that Jeeves did. Oh and it would be nice if Google's fiscal priorities were aligned with maintaining my privacy like Jeeves's are rather than exploiting it.
Don't use Google. :) (Score:2)
Use adblock plus to block google analytics, don't use any social networking sites...
Honestly, your best bet would be to get off the internet at this point.
You could do it yourself. (Score:4, Funny)
No one will pay any attention.
Re: (Score:2)
Do a search on whatever you're interested in. Then precede those searches with something completely random,like airplanes...
Mod NoYob +5 "Scary+Funny"
For a simple answer to the question... (Score:4, Funny)
Bing? (Score:2)
Ned: Phil? Hey, Phil? Phil! Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you!
Phil: Hi, how you doing? Thanks for watching.
[Starts to walk away]
Ned: Hey, hey! Now, don't you tell me you don't remember me because I sure as heckfire remember you.
Phil: Not a chance.
Ned: Ned... Ryerson. "Needlenose Ned"? "Ned the Head"? C'mon, buddy. Case Western High. Ned Ryerson: I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson: got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't grad
You don't (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me you have two options. 1) Accept the trade off of having Google uses your information for targeted advertising in exchange for their service. 2) Stop using Google's services.
Use Bing instead of Google search. Switch to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or use an email client. Use Bing's maps instead of Google Maps. etc. I don't think any of these options really ensure your privacy any better than using Google does but if your fear is of Google specifically (sort of irrational IMO) then these are options.
Personally I don't mind the first option because honestly I'm not that interesting. I don't do anything with Google services that would be very interesting to anyone at Google or an intelligence service. There seems to be very little risk for a decent reward.
clusty; whitelisting cookies (Score:3, Insightful)
I do my searches using clusty.com rather than google, for exactly this reason. In most cases, the search results are exactly the same quality as google's. It doesn't have certain specialized features that google has, e.g., book search and image search.
A simple way of enhancing your privacy is to set your firefox preferences so that it deletes all cookies when you exit the browser, except for cookies from a specified whitelist. Edit : Preferences : privacy. Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Firefox will: Use custom settings for history. Keep until: I close Firefox. Exceptions: [set your list of exceptions]
But basically, if you completely hitch your wagon to gmail, google docs, etc., then I don't see how you can expect to preserve your privacy from being invaded by google. Google is an advertising company, and their whole business model revolves around selling your eyeballs.
Its the cost of admission... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't use Gmail (Score:3)
Running your own email server isn't exactly hard as long as your ISP is willing to change your PTR record and give you a static IP. Well worth it even just for the gains in privacy.
For google search i would use an anonimisng proxy, run a http proxy (bandwidth limited) to muddle your searches in between other people's but you will get the much hated 'sorry, your computer is generating automated queries screen' and will sometimes have to enter a capcha in order to use google search the odd time
I get cross gmail account ads (Score:5, Interesting)
As with a comment above, "if you have nothing to hide", I don't have anything to hide. But it is somewhat unsettling.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I get that lab stuff too. Just ignore it. It doesn't make any part of your body get larger.
Handy Firefox Plugins (Score:4, Informative)
Could be the wrong question (Score:3)
In the other hand, your "privacy" could be the line that separates a world of noise and spam to the real info you need. And Google services, specially when used in integrated form, could be pretty practical
Use multiple browsers (Score:3, Insightful)
For years, I have used one browser (Safari) for nothing but online banking. I now use Chrome for all google related browsing (GMail+Google Apps, Blogger, Reader).
I do all other browsing on Firefox, blocking Google and most other cookies.
This is slightly inconvenient because if someone emails me a link, I need to copy and paste it into Firefox - probably copy/paste links between Chrome and Firefox about 5 to 10 times a day so this is a small overhead.
I usually use Google Search (on Firefox), but I also use Clusty and Bing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And if google were to do something similar, they will have to charge you for googling without tracking you. And lower the price to, free, if you agree to be data-mined.
PS: on second thought charging for 'privacy guaranteed' service indeed seems nice, I wish one of the search provider comes up with suc
Here's what I do... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Use different browser profiles for different web applications.
If you start firefox with these options: -no-remote -ProfileManager it will allow you to run multiple copies simultaneously, each with a separate profile (different set of cookies, different set of plugins, different skins, different bookmarks, different histories, etc).
I create a specific profile for each major web app - I have one for IMDB, one for google searches, one for google mail, one for google voice, etc. And one for generic browsing.
Each profile has a couple of add-ons:
Adblock Plus [mozilla.org] - general catch-all to block things like doubleclick and the million other trackers
CookieSafe Lite [mozilla.org] - for fine-grained control of what sites can set cookies
NoScript [mozilla.org] - for fine-grained control of what sites can use javascript and flash
Redirect Cleaner [mozilla.org] - for removing those "bounce links" that a lot of sites use to track you when you follow a URL off their site, with the cleaner you go directly to the destination URL
RefControl [mozilla.org] - for clearing out or rewriting the referrer URL - prevents sites from knowing where you came from when you clicked a URL to their site, sometimes helpful in accessing poorly 'restricted' content
Targetted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out [mozilla.org] - sets special cookies that sites may choose to obey to say "don't profile me" since these TACOs are not unique-per-user, I figure it can't hurt although it probably doesn't do anything
User Agent Switcher [mozilla.org] - Lets your browser identify itself as a different browser - this is very important
Ghostery [mozilla.org] - Informational Only - tells you what tracking sites may be tracking you on any given page (does not block them, and you get false alarms on sites where NoScript blocks javascript, but it is still good for situational awareness)
Better Privacy [mozilla.org] - Blocks new stealth "super cookies" in Flash and DOM Storage Objects. VERY IMPORTANT
Using the above plugins, I do the following in each profile:
1) Set NoScript to only allow javascript from the one website the profile is intended for - and block flash as much as possible regardless due to cross-profile flash cookies
2) Set CookieSafe that same way and then only for per-session cookies
3) Block and/or auto-delete Flash and DOM Storage cookies with Better Privacy - note flash cookies tend to be shared across all profiles because they go in a folder under "Documents & Settings" on MS Windows and ~/.macromedia/ on Linux. I am still looking at ways to force each profile to use a different directory for flash cookies - until then, block flash as much as possible and auto-delete cookies frequently
4) Set the User Agent to be different in each profile - this gives the appearance of multiple users behind a firewall which is key
5) Load a different theme or skin for each profile to make it easy to visually distinguish between windows so you don't accidentally start browsing the web from your gmail window or vice-versa
All that is a little bit of a pain to set up, an hour or two total. But once in place, I think it is a reasonable compromise for reducing the risk of having your personally identifiable information gleaned in services like Google Mail from being automatically cross-referenced with your browsing habits. I am considering taking it a step further with FoxyProxy [mozilla.org] configurations to use
Wrong Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Your ISP knows much, much more about you than Google does.
New vs Old Slashdot (Score:3)
I notice several posts have been made regarding the current Slashdot con census regarding privacy. When some people say that they aren't worried about any privacy issues because they're too insignifant to care about as far as Google's concerned, some others pipe up and comment that in the "old days" of Slashdot, they'd be in the extreme minority, whereas nowadays it's fairly common to see this opinion.
Here's the problem - there IS no privacy on the Internet anymore. Compared to the old days of Slashdot, surveillance and logging has become so commonplace and pervasive, that even if you don't put your particulars on the Internet yourself, someone else might do it themselves. A good example would be a friend who uploads a picture on Facebook which has you tagged, even if you don't use Facebook. Heck, if you don't use it, you may not even know the picture exists until it's brought to your attention. At the very least, it's hard to remain isolated from the privacy issues of the Internet, short of becoming a hermit and avoiding any social contact.
So the reason privacy is being given up, as seen by some people, is because it's frigging tiring to have to check, double-check, workaround and in the end, give-up the fun and useful services and technologies available to us on the Internet, because very little of them respect total privacy. It's also hard to justify such extreme paranoia when it's highly unlikely you'll encounter any actual problems, so long as you use common sense.
In the end, we're all gonna die anyway, so freaking RELAX. Whatever privacy issues you were concerned about won't matter an iota regardless of whether you get buried, cremated or shot out of a canon into the sun.
PS. There's also the tiny fact that you WON'T CONVINCE EVERYONE about the importance of privacy anymore. That boat has sailed, given how much Facebook is used as a benchmark. So don't fret about worried how how you think privacy is becoming extinct. If you want to live in the modern digital age, it already has...
Easy as pie in 3 firefox extensions (Score:3, Informative)
Then configure CookieSafe to "Deny Cookies Globally" (you can easily make exceptions for some sites). BetterPrivacy and TrackMeNot come with suitable defaults.
With this set-up, no cookies will be created. DOM Storage (super-cookies) and flash cookies will be wiped whenever you close your browser. And you will gently spam Google and other search engines with random searches, just in case they do tracking by IP addresses.
You may also want to throw in:
How do I have my cake and eat it too? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Remember your tin foil hat (Score:5, Insightful)