Search My Notes

There are many pages of posts on many subjects, and only a few show on this main page. Search for the subjects that you are interested in.

Topics covered in here tend toward Gadgetry, Weapons, Books, Tools, and a lot of other things that have captured my interest.

Please note the "Linked From Here" tab on the results, which lists search results from sites I have linked to in my posts.

GoogleSharing

http://www.googlesharing.net/images/diagram2.png

I am going to make a couple of assumptions here. One is that you are in the 99.9% of internet users that do all your searching via Google. That is a pretty safe bet.

The next assumption is that you use Firefox as a browser. The top 25% of knowledgeable computer users do, and I'd like to think you guys are in that category.

Okay, on to the chase, and a condensed version of what goes on . . .

Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. They know everything you've ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you've ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, thanks to things like Google Analytics, they even know which websites you visited that you didn't reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you've ever sent or received, whether you've deleted it or not.

They know who your friends are, where you live, where you work, and where you spend your free time. They know about your health, your love life, and your political leanings. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you're doing, they also have significant insight into what you're thinking.

Google says they don't keep that information and don't share it. Since our dearly unbeloved Homeland (in)Security even tried tracking the loaning of library books it is a pretty safe bet that one day it or some other government agency prowling for dissidents is going to dig deeply into Google's database. You might be comfortable with that, but I feel like my actions and interests are not the government's business.

GoogleSharing is an addon for Firefox and a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, so that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom.

The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is affected, nothing else. If you want, you can turn it on or off with one click and takes only a moment to uninstall.

All you need to do is install the addon for instant privacy. This is a good idea. Do it!

Remember, even paranoid people have enemies.

(Me) (Home)

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