There are few things we can do electronically involving the Internet and modern communications that are private. Our credit and debit cards leaves a rich behavior path. The phone company knows who, when and where we call and who calls us. They have a record of our text messages. Our instant messaging partner has a log of our IM activities. Our ISP certainly knows every web site we visit. And for the most part, our preferred search engine provider has a log of our search history.
Although there are many search engines, Google dominates. They dominate because they return relative links based on our inquiry. Its secret sauce is good. Is there anyway around it?
A recent article suggested six things we can do to protect our privacy when using Google services:
This advise should be classified in the good housekeeping arena. Even these things are not going to keep Google, or any other search engine or service provider, from formulating a user profile on each of us.
The bottom line is that we should know that big brother is watching and big brother wears multiple hats. As the lines between government and corporate blur, the problem will only worsen.
Whether we have things to hide or not, the government and business clearly are pushing the limit on our American Constitution’s 4th Amendment. With the trends in society today, the Constitution is becoming, unfortunately, a historical document with some good suggestions but not something that cannot be interrupted to suit the times. We are seeing it melt before our very eyes.
Prudence says everything we do online is being logged and we should act accordingly.
4 August 2009 at 17:21
I totally agree with this article on the fact that there are several items that we have to change, i didn’t know we could add SSL into out google; this is great to know, that way we can be more secure about what we do and what we enter on the internet.