What "do no evil" Google Knows about You

And what it does with it:

Google knows too much about you

(CNN) -- If you use Google, and I know you do, you may have noticed a little banner popping up at the top of the page announcing: "We're changing our privacy policy and terms." It gives you the choice to "Learn More" or, another option, the one I'm betting most people followed, to "Dismiss."

Who wants to read about what Google plans to do with all that information it has about us?

[...]

If Americans -- or people anywhere -- decided to take up Google's offer to check out its new policy, they would discover something so troubling, so frightening, really, that it would override the national tendency to leave companies alone to make money how they see fit. At least in the case of companies such as Google -- and now Facebook -- which know more about us than even our closest friends.

Here's what Google knows about you, what it stores right there on its servers, waiting for a hacker:

Google has every e-mail you ever sent or received on Gmail. It has every search you ever made, the contents of every chat you ever had over Google Talk. It holds a record of every telephone conversation you had using Google Voice, it knows every Google Alert you've set up. It has your Google Calendar with all content going back as far as you've used it, including everything you've done every day since then. It knows your contact list with all the information you may have included about yourself and the people you know. It has your Picasa pictures, your news page configuration, indicating what topics you're most interested in. And so on.

If you ever used Google while logged in to your account to search for a person, a symptom, a medical side effect, a political idea; if you ever gossiped using one of Google's services, all of this is on Google's servers. And thanks to the magic of Google's algorithms, it is easy to sift through the information because Google search works like a charm. Google can even track searches on your computer when you're not logged in for up to six months.

Facebook has even more interesting stuff: your pictures, your comments, your likes, your friends, your un-friends.

[...]

Google's famous motto is "do no evil." I won't accuse Google of deliberately doing evil. It has done much to improve our lives. It makes no secret of the fact that it seeks to make profits, which it richly deserves. I do believe, however, that it deliberately tries to deceive us when it claims the new privacy policy seeks "to provide you with as much transparency and choice as possible."

I followed the instructions and with some difficulty eventually downloaded pages upon pages of personal material about myself from Google. What I was looking for was a simple, shall we say beautiful, button telling Google not to save anything I don't explicitly want it to save. But there was no such button.

Google, like Facebook, owns trillions if not quadrillions-plus bits of information. They mine it, use it to sell ads, algorithm it. But my real fear is not Google. My real fear is that computer technology has turned into an arms race between good guys and bad guys. Google may see itself as a jaunty white hat wearer, valiantly protecting all our information. And it may be doing it to the best of its ability. But hackers are hard at work all the time. [...]

Is the concept of privacy, as we've known it, destine to become a thing of the past?

Read the whole thing for embedded links, and more about what is being attempted to contain this collection and use of personal data.

And here is something you can do, before March 1st:

How to delete your Google browsing history in three simple steps . . . before it's too late to hide your secrets


Also see:

Social Media Dangers in our Brave New World

Are Facebook's "Social Plugins" making the service less popular with older users?
     

Do you think you have privacy on the internet?

Guess again. An interesting article from LinuxInsider.com:

Who's Watching You Browse?

Being on the Internet is like living in a village: Everyone knows who you are and all the details of your private life -- except that on the Internet, it's not just people you may have known all your life who know a lot about you; it's complete and utter strangers.

It's not just that those strangers may know stuff that could really make you uncomfortable, such as the fact that you perhaps posted photos of yourself stinking drunk on your Facebook More about Facebook page. More importantly, they can track the Web sites you visit and report back to someone who wants to track you, has malicious intentions or wants to sell you something.

Take, for example, a company called LeadLife, which has an app that can determine who is visiting a client's Web site, how the visitor got to the client's Web site; and which of the client's products the visitor is most interested in. LeadLife is one of many companies offering such a service. Other firms put trackers on users' browsers so they know just where the visitors go and, based on that, launch targeted marketing campaigns.

Over the years, several third-party companies offering apps that mask users' identities have sprung up. Recently, browser vendors have begun including a privacy mode in their products, but are these good enough?

And just what is privacy, anyhow? [...]

Read the rest of the article to see the many ways in which you do not have privacy on the internet, the ineffective ways privacy is guarded, and what (if anything) you can do about it.

It explains how websites I've visited freqently have built up profiles on me, and then alter the banner ads on their sites based on web browsing I've done. Yikes.

Brave New World, with such people in it.
     

GeoCities Free Web Sites will soon be no more

I got the following notice in my email:

Important notice: GeoCities is closing.

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. [...]

The email goes on to say that the free websites can be moved to a yahoo paid website, for a monthly fee:

Sign up for Yahoo! Web Hosting for only $4.99 a month

I have one of the free websites. In 2000, I made a trip back east, and made a visit to my old hometown where I grew up. I took a lot of photos, then displayed them on my free GeoCities website:


Simsbury Photo Gallery

The site did well for a couple of years, I got some interesting comments in my guestbook. Then traffic started to fall off sharply, as other websites with photos of the town began to be listed first in search results. Now a search with the towns name and the word photo won't even come up with my site on the first 15 pages of a Google search (I didn't look any further than that. Neither would most people, I expect.)

Now I'm not surprised they are dumping the free sites. They cost money to maintain, and take up space on their servers. And certainly my site hasn't been getting traffic in recent years. I meant to do more with the site, but then we moved to Oregon and I didn't get back to working on it. Even if I had, getting traffic via web searches would have been problematic. Now my "new" photos are nine years old; the site itself is dated. I was going to work on it more, but there's no point now. It's not worth it for me to maintain it as a paid site, so it will disappear soon.

Building the site was a fun learning experience. But free websites are becoming a thing of the past. Websites like mine. I never would have built it as a paid site; it was a fun indulgence. Now it and a whole slew of websites like it are about to face the delete button. Websites that never would have existed if the hosting had not been offered for free. The free sites were a creative outlet for people who might otherwise have never built a website.

GeoCities was one of the largest free website communities online. I will miss it. Goodbye GeoCities. The ever changing face of The Web will never be quite the same again without you.
     

Firefox 3 Memory Issues Explained

Pat and I were talking about how the latest versions of Firefox (3.X) uses memory. He read that at times it uses much greater amounts of memory than Firefox 2 did. Then I came across this article, explaining how the usage is now more efficient, and verifiable in test results:

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

[...] Ways to test

There are many ways to measure memory usage in a browser. Open up 10 tabs with your favorite websites in them and see how much memory the browser is using. Close all but the last tab and load about:blank or Google. Measure again. Another simple test is simply loading Zimbra, Google Reader and Zoho each in their own tab and logging in. We’ve learned that users do so many things with the browser it is nearly impossible to construct a single test to measure memory usage.

We wanted more of a stress test — One that was more reproducible than loading random sites from the web.

[...]

For the results below we loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles (319 total page loads), always opening a new window for each page load (closing the oldest window alive once we hit 30 windows). At the end we close all the windows but one and let the browser sit for a few minutes so see if they will reclaim memory, clear short-term caches, etc. There is a 3 second delay between page loads to try and get all the browsers to take the same amount of time. We used the proxy server that is part of Standalone Talos to make sure we were serving up the same content. We had to disable popup blocking to allow the test window to open the 30 windows for running the test. You can get the simple webpage test here and the python script to monitor memory usage here. These things are built on top of the standalone talos framework so you’ll need to drop the python script in with talos to get good results. Mad props to Mike Schroepfer for getting this all working.

Results



Looking at the graph:

* All browsers increase in memory use slightly over time, but the Firefox 3 slope is closer to 0.

* The _peak_ of Firefox 3 is lower than the terminal size of Firefox 2!

* The terminal state of Firefox 3 is nearly 140MB smaller than Firefox 2. 60% less memory!

* IE7 doesn’t appear to give any memory back, even after all the windows are closed!

* Firefox 3 ends up about 400mb smaller than IE7 at the end of the test!

This is just one test that I feel shows the great progress that has been made. We’ll continue working on adding additional tests that can measure more of the ways that users use their browser.

Conclusion

Our work has paid off.

We’re significantly smaller than previous versions of Firefox and other browsers.

You can keep the browser open for much longer using much less memory.

Extensions are much less likely to cause leaks.

We’ve got automated tools in place to detect leaks that might result from new code. We’re always monitoring and testing to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.

All of this has been done while dramatically improving performance. [...]

If you follow the link to the full article, there is LOTS more information, and embedded links too. I just excerpted the parts that seemed to matter most - or should I say, that I actually understood best ;-).
     

Our internet "Crisis": To be or not to be (on-line)

Our Wildblue Satellite broadband internet service has gone on the fritz. For the past few days, we've had to use dial-up, but even that hasn't been working reliably. We are supposed to get 10 hours a month of free dial up service from Wildblue, but it only works sporadically. I spent a long time on the phone with customer support, but they could not help. They said there was nothing wrong on their end, with the satellite or the dial-up.

We have a repairman scheduled to come out on Monday for the satellite problem, so hopefully we get the broadband access back then. I crawled under the house to see if rats had chewed through a cable or something. Every thing looked fine, so I would guess it's a problem with the modem or the dish.

As for the dial-up problem, I decided to sign up again with our former dial-up ISP service, ISP.COM, to see if we have the same problem as with Wildblue's dial-up. Happily, we don't. ISP.com seems reliably consistent, so the dial-up problem with the Wildblue service must be something on their end.

Not having internet access for the past couple of days has been a real eye opener.

I remember in the early days of the internet, I used it quite a lot. But sometimes I got sick of it, and I would just take a break from it for one, two or three days. It was no big deal, I had plenty of other stuff to do; my life didn't revolve around the computer.

Nowadays, it's not so easy to just stop using the internet. I have gotten tired of it, but whenever I have resolved to not use it for a few days, it seems impossible. I've come to depend on it for so many things. For example:

The weather. Living on a farm, I really need to know what the weather is going to be like, so I can plan my work day. My choice is to wait for a generalized weather broadcast that will probably be inaccurate anyway, or go on-line and look at the satellite maps myself, and see what's coming. I can also get a personalized weather forecast for our exact location, from our local TV station's website.

On-line banking. Bills are due, it's too late to use snail mail. Gotta go on-line and do it!

Major purchases. Our 15 year old washing machine broke down this week. Time to buy a new one. First thing I would do nowadays it go on line and find the new one I want. The place we want to buy it from is 40 miles away. Why not call them up, buy it over the phone? They deliver. It's easy to do when you know what you want already, and the internet makes that easier.

News. I've come to realize, that I get most of my news and information on-line, from trusted sources. I never sit down and watch network news anymore. Sometimes I have it on the TV while I wash dishes or feed the dogs, and I half listen to it, just to stay in touch with the current crap the MSM is pushing. But I don't rely on it, because it is such crap.

The past few days, I've had to rely on it. It's been a very disheartening experience. I'd forgotten what it's like, to depend so much on the MSM for information. I fear it's what the majority of Americans do, and it explains a lot about why things are the way they are. It seems that most people are not well informed, and feed on the junk-food sound-bites of the MSM.

For instance, I keep hearing about how John McCain picked Sarah Palin, a "totally unknown person that nobody ever hear of", according to the MSM. Well I heard of her last year, quite a bit too, as her name was being bandied about as a possible veep pick. That's because I read about things on-line that pertain to the GOP, because it interests me.

But the MSM doesn't share my interests. When they talk about the GOP, it's usually about some "scandal", real or imagined. It's not hard to see why someone who relies on the MSM for their news would agree with the MSM's assessment that "nobody ever heard of Sara Palin".

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets their news and information from the internet. But I think I've assumed that a lot of other people do too, when in fact, they don't. Chances are that the people who watch garbage TV also look at garbage internet when they are on-line.

And amongst those who do get their news and information on-line, many (if not most?) are left leaning, and get their "talking points" and such from their preferred sources.

The MSM also has their on-line presence, so they still dominate the public discourse and choose the topics. At least on-line you can pick and choose somewhat, even amongst their offerings. But with radio and TV, you get what you get. It's awful to think that that is what the majority of Americans do, but it probably is. I guess I should be thankful that we still have choices. Before the internet, I used to rely on magazine subscriptions for news I was interested in. The internet is easier. May it continue.

Then there is blogging too. I didn't used to blog, but now I do, and it becomes addictive. I can take a break from blogging, buy even when I do, it's tempting to just look in and check on comments, and the site meter, etc. It's wonderful to be able to express you opinions on an open medium like the internet, and connect with like minded people, and share information and learn things. Chas' Compilation is primarily about sharing whatever it is I'm reading and learning about. When others chime in with their own two cents about what they know on a topic, it's often interesting and fun.

All things considered, taking a complete break from the internet isn't nearly as easy as it used to be. I've come to depend on it to quickly find the information that I want. It's been like having the computer from Star Trek at my fingertips; the ultimate encyclopedia. The education that I always wanted from college but could never find.

Even so, the Web Withdrawal of the past few days has had some good effects. I've remembered how much I enjoy books; I have a stack of them I want to read, and I'm promising myself not to neglect them. I've got a few hobbies and subjects that I would like to pursue, that the internet can help me with, but that also involve things off-line that I like to do; I'm resolved to do them.

The internet is a great tool; Google and WikiHow etc, are great helpers, but the internet is no substitute for living. Yet it can enhance it. It's all a question of balance.

I may be blogging less while we are restricted to dial-up. But even after we have broadband back, I may not blog quite so much; I may be more particular about what I blog about. I have rediscovered how much I enjoy being away from the computer, and I think being away from it more also makes me appreciate it more. So there.

We'll see how long this lasts, when the broadband comes back. ;-)


Related Links:

A Different World Indeed...

Childhood, Past and Present

I'm still stuck with 24K dial-up - aargh!

10 Days without windows... The Machine Stops
     

The Internet's DNS Vulnerability; is it hype, or can the World Wide Web be destroyed?

Is the web that vulnerable? When it comes to networking type stuff, I find it hard to follow, I'm just not that geeky. But this sounds pretty serious:

Web Doomsday Averted: Kaminsky
Security researcher Dan Kaminsky argues that the recent DNS vulnerability wasn't just hype: it could have destroyed the Web.

LAS VEGAS -- The recent Domain Name System (define) caching flaw that had security experts scrambling to protect the Web wasn't just hype. The Internet as we know it was at risk, according to a security researcher Dan Kaminsky.

During a discussion on front of a packed hall at the Black Hat conference today, Kaminsky detailed flaws in the system that translates domain names into IP addresses, which he's been trying to hide for the last thirty days.

In a 70-minute session with over 50 slides, Kaminsky explained in excruciating detail the flaw in DNS and the myriad ways it could have been exploited to destroy the Internet as we know it.

Kaminsky was quick to point out that the patch for the DNS flaw has been widely deployed, protecting users from what otherwise could have been a nightmare scenario. [...]

Some will argue that it's hype. But do we have to wait for the web to fail before we take it seriously enough? A near disaster may have been averted for now, but apparently it's not over yet:

Updated: The patch for critical Internet flaw may be flawed itself

A Russian researcher has reported there are holes in the patch for the DNS flaw that threatened the foundations of the Internet.

Just a month ago, Dan Kaminsky told the world that the Internet’s Domain Name Server system for routing Internet users to the proper addresses for web sites could be compromised. He had organized a months-long effort to create a patch to fix the problem. But not it appears the patch doesn’t do the job, according to a story in the New York Times. It confirms Kaminsky’s own warning that the patch was a stopgap measure and that there were worse things coming out. [...]

I read somewhere that DNS is an inferior system that needs to be replaced with an alternative, however I can't find the article presently. I admit the technical aspects are over my head, so I can't comment on it extensively. But this story, as a security matter, does bear watching. So many businesses rely heavily on the internet now, and a major problem with it could affect world markets, and thus all of us.


Related Link:

Russia and Georgia continue attacks--online