It Is Your Personal Privacy, Do You Let Someone Invade It?

I value my privacy and my personal information, it is not for sale. I have already gone through an ID theft once.

By now everyone had jumped on the Google+ band wagon, no?

I haven't and here is why:

The ID theft was for the most part very minor compared to what can happen now, we lost a couple thousand dollars and had some bad debt run up against our credit. But in the end we cleaned it and learned some valuable lessons along the way.

If you read Google's TOS (Terms Of Service) when you sign up for any of their 'public' offerings such as GMail, Google Blog, or Google+ you have to sign a privacy statement.

When you agree to Google's terms you give up the right to hide your personal information (Google was sued in Europe this has since change but that is no reason to give up your privacy!) you provide to Google along with agreeing to allowing Google use an 'enhanced' cookie on your computer.

This 'enhanced cookie' gathers more information than a regular cookie, such as all the web sites you have visited (up to 100 sites), any searches you have done with the text of the search, and if you use social media what you posted while using sites such as Facebook, Myspace, or twitter.

This all started over four years ago with the new TOS for web site owners that use Google AdSense to make money, you have seen the blocks of "Ads by Google" and "Ad choice" on a lot of web sites.

What Google did was tell the web site owner if they wanted to use AdSense they had to agree to put code on the web site that collected information about any one that landed on a page that had AdSense on it. The theory from Google was they wanted to 'enhance the readers search results' by tracking what the reader had searched for and build a profile of the readers web site visits and searches.

Ya, right. Google is spying on you just like their cars with cameras driving around making maps of cities. Google 'says' it will not sell or give the data to anyone, that it is for 'internal use only' which is a lie, some of the data has already been 'leaked' by an 'unauthorized' workers. Did that worker get fired? Google refuses to comment.

I declined, cancelled my AdSense Account and removed the code for AdSense from all my web sites.

My visitors personal privacy is worth way more that the money I would make by having the ads on my web sites.

Troubleshoot, repair, maintain, upgrade & secure...     With this!

And guess who is the prime buyer of your Personal Privacy information?

So how do you stop the "Big Brother" Google from gathering that Personal Privacy information that you would rather they don't get?

News Flash: Google can trick the 'In Privacy Settings' on IE 8/9/10. Read about that the other day that Google's cookie code has a way around those settings if you use them.

One way is to use a different Search Engine (that is what Google, Bing, Yahoo! are) for your searches. I started using Bing or Live!, and now duckduckgo.com for my searches.

The are some other ways to keep Google from collecting your information:

1. You could use 'Anonymous' proxy web sites to do searches, these web sites are proxies so that the search originates on the web site not your computer [I don't recommend using proxy web siets by the way...].
2. You could use one of those 'Tracker' programs that hide you tracks by giving out false information to cookie collectors. However from reading about a guy that thought he was clever when using one. His wife was collecting all the information about his activities with another woman from the 'Tracker' software. So read up on those if you decide to go that way.
3. The best way to protect your Personal Privacy is to use a ram drive and put your temp files on the ram drive along with the cookie folder, set your browser to use the ram drive for all history and temp files. (To move the cookie folder you have to hack the registry to change the path to the ram drive).
   1. Once you shut down your computer you know that all the history and cookies have been deleted.
   2. There is a small price to pay for this technique: If you are a person that uses the 'Remember me' check box web sites you have to log on to when you put your cookie folder on the ram drive when you power down the computer all those user ID's and Passwords that you told the browser to remember will be deleted.

Now the really bad news about Personal Privacy: Like MySpace, and Facebook, Google has stated that once you give your personal information to them by agreeing to their TOS you can not ask them to delete it if you cancel your account and the data is theirs to use however they please! Some country's laws are that such information gathered by a web host has to be kept for a certain length of time, in the USA it is SEVEN YEARS!

Microsoft was sued and lost the suit when they introduced IE 5 that gathered personal privacy information, maybe Google will have the same type of suit in the near future being brought by the EU, however will the plaintiff's win?

P.S.

A news outlet is saying that Google has introduced the new cookie on 1 March 2012 (were they already using it?), so maybe you should delete all your browser history everyday?

At the time I wrote this article I was not using Google +, since that time Google has removed the code from the above cookie and has rewritten their privacy statement and are abiding by the statement, however I do use the RAM Drive to store temp files and cookies.

At this time I am using DuckDuckGo for my default web search engine, here is some of what I found: Click here.

Update 02/20/20 - With Windows 10 (and 32 GB of ram) I haven't put the ram drive program I use on the system as of yet, when I complete the renovation of this web site and get the blog operational I will give it a shot, a Gig of memory for the temp files and cookies should be enough however the swap or paging file will have to stay on a hard drive, I would need a minimum of 64 GB to make a 32 GB ram drive for the swap/paging file to fit...

Update 06/07/21 - Well my Wonderful Wife has let me buy another 32 GB of DDR 4 ram, so now I have the room for a 33 GB or bigger Ram Drive. So now I get to experiment: I have four Operating Systems on this computer: 3 Windows 10, one Windows 7. Of the three Win 10 one is for work, I use a VM Ware virtual computer with XP loaded to work on this web site, then I have another Win 10 that I use for Games, and the last Win 10 I use to experiment on, I have images of each in case I mess them up. The experimental OS gets the most reloads... I have made a RAM Drive for each Win 10 install (haven't decided on the Win 7 install, it is there mainly to have a built in ERD incase of failure of the Win 10 installs. The RAM Drive for each Win 10 has a different function, the Win 10 for work has the swap file and Temp directory. The Win 10 for Games has an almost empty 33GB RAM Drive, I copy the game to the RD to play, much faster than the hard drive it is on (it is a 7200 RPM drive) and the Win 10 Experimental also has an empty RAM Drive.