Sunday, February 26, 2012

Google Privacy Concerns ?

Following Google's announcement that they intend to harvest my entire Google search history and sell it to the highest bidder, along with my email address, blog posts and the right to drop ads everywhere based on the content of my personal emails and search terms (if I understand their (deliberately?) prolix but unhelpful privacy policy correctly - the above may not be 100% correct but it "illustrates a wider truth"), with a certain sadness I've today changed my homepage to IxQuick, which advertises itself as "the world's most private search engine".

It's probably wholly owned by some intelligence agency - indeed, it's approved by the EU, so caveat emptor. It has an anonymised Google front-end, for those who can't do without Mountain View.

Pity. Started on Altavista all those years ago, been using Google for ten or more years. But as the marketing side of Google took off, quite apart from the annoying ads which follow you around from site to site, I'm increasingly pained by Google's attempts to return the results it thinks I'm interested in, rather than the results I've asked for.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try Bing. Its really rather good...

Anonymous said...

try Firefox with the Ad-Block and ghostery add-ons.

AC1

bensix said...

I'm increasingly pained by Google's attempts to return the results it thinks I'm interested in, rather than the results I've asked for.

I presume you don't have Facebook? God, I'm sick of Mark Zuckerberg assuming that "single" implies "interested in Russian brides".