webrampage

In this day and age, privacy is quite essential when we browse the internet or check our email. But, do we have any privacy? Google is not only the leading search engine, but also the leader in privacy issues. Am pretty sure most people would not think of Google having a big privacy issue. I’ve explained below why our privacy is in risk when using anything from Google or even when visiting one of their sites.

Unique ID

Google’s cookies are like immortal, they will expire in 2038. When you first go to Google they give you one of their cookies and it acts like a unique ID. For all searches they record the unique cookie ID, your IP address, date and time, your search terms and your browser config. They can access these info anytime they want.

Google’s toolbar is Spyware

Google toolbar is a spyware. Uninstall it immediately! Their toolbar sends out info about all the pages you browse and it is stored under your unique ID. And it reads your cookie too (your passwords, user-names, etc. are stored in cookies). They also stated this in their privacy policy, but didn’t explain all the details and made it look normal.

And their toolbar updates automatically, where Microsoft’s and other ones ask if you would like to update.

Google web accelerator shares info

Google’s web accelerator (not so popular) shares your caches and cookies with other browsers, and they do it to make pages load faster.

Google’s cached-copy of sites is illegal

Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google’s cached-copy of sites appear to be illegal. Everything on your site gets cached! Put a “noarchive” meta on your site, but I don’t think it will prevent your site being cached by Google.

Gmail getting indexed

Each and every email you send and receive gets indexed. Google says that your email could help someone else. (I wouldn’t want my personal info to be on Google search results).

Google helping spammers?

Google helps spammers or they themselves are spamming. People claim that they have searched something on Google and later the content in their spam emails are relevant to what they have searched for earlier.

When New York Times asked Sergey Brin in 2002, that why Google needs these data and he had no comments. I would say use Google at your own risk!

Trust me, do not register domains with Yahoo!. Rather do it with GoDaddy or some Netfirms. I registered my domain with Yahoo, and it ended up being one of those sites that just contain Google ads. And Yahoo! is not even a domain registrar, they are just a reseller for Melbourne IT (some stupid company in Australia).

Bought my domain with Yahoo! for $2 (it was a promotion) and it worked fine until 2 days later an automated message tells me that my “Yahoo! Premium Service” was canceled for no good reason (at least send me an email explaining what happened rather than a general automated message).

Tried to contact the customer service (it was like impossible), then had to call them and wait 40 mins before i got to talk with one of the customer service people. They weren’t very helpful and told me to call sales department, and eventually they activated it back (i had to pay again).

Again 2 days later it canceled, with the same stupid automated message. Emailed them, and they were not helpful at all and were telling me to clear my cookies in my browser (so irrelevant!). Emailed them like 6 times, called them twice, but no one helped me. And my domain went into redemption period and i could not register it again (and i lost hope).

Some company bought my domain (yahoo! probably sold it to them) and they use it to display ads. And someone gave me a offer to buy it for $200. Well, I don’t know if I can get it back.

I have been hearing stuff about Google’s Gmail (aka Google Mail in UK), that each and everyone of your emails are being indexed. And could end up in Google’s search results. Well that is a BIG PRIVACY ISSUE!

It is true that Google doesn’t really care about our privacy, because the googlebots (the robots aka spiders that crawl sites and index it for google search results) index everything and sometimes it contains confidential/personal stuff. And most of all it doesn’t follow what is written in a site’s robots.txt. And it is really really difficult (sometimes impossible) to get a search result off Google.

My email address appears on a Google….And spammers could just add it to their list and spam me. Well I like how Microsoft respects your privacy..

I’ll post more about the Gmail issue later, after I learn more. It could be true!