"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Eric Schmidt told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo in a December 2009 interview."
Here's another gem from Schmidt:
"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," Schmidt told the Atlantic at the Washington Ideas Forum in October 2010. He went on, speaking about the future of search, "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
They have a long history of getting their "fingers caught in the cookie jar" regarding user privacy. First red flag for me was the launch of GMail, with which the user's e-mail was scanned for content for (supposedly) marketing purposes, or I guess as they would describe it, "to enhance the experience for their users", lol. I never wanted a GMail account for that reason, but opened one just to use occasionally for times I didn't want to give my personal address (basically using it as a spam-catcher). I was pretty pissed when I discovered later that YouTube had changed my account's e-mail address to that GMail account without any warning. And how did they know both were me anyway? I guess they used the IP address. Now I use that account strictly to receive YouTube notifications - never send anything from it.
When they came out with Street View, it irritated me that they'd drive down quiet neighborhood streets in an unmarked van photographing everything without any kind of notice. Their defense was that this was public info anyway - that anyone could get. I beg to differ... physical distance affords a certain amount of privacy, and now freaks, criminals & stalkers have a cool new tool to use thanks to Google.
It didn't stop there... turned out (at least some of) Google's vans were equipped with WiFi antennae to map out wireless networks for some unfathomable reason, and in the process, they ended up scarfing up tons of private data (like e-mail content) from unencrypted wireless networks. Of course when caught in the cookie jar again, they did their usual feint of shock and concern...
"At Google’s Zeitgeist conference in May 2010, Eric Schmidt addressed concerns over Google's Street View cars, which had recently been revealed to have collected personal data over unsecured Wi-Fi connections. "No harm, no foul," Schmidt reportedly said of the incident, according to The Times of London. “A relatively small of data was collected and this was not authorized [...] We stopped driving immediately. There appears to be no use of data. It’s sitting on a hard drive. [...] We will not delete [the collected data] until ordered to do so.”
"No harm, no foul"? FUCK you, you creepy little bastard... anyone who thinks Google doesn't know exactly what the hell they are doing is naive.
Shoot forward to the recent past, when Google announced their new consolidated (lack of) privacy policy. Then, they are caught purposefully bypassing Apple Safari's built-in privacy mechanisms to track the user anyway via their cookies. By the way, read up sometime on the Google cookie. Now at least one user is suing Google for doing this:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/22/googl ... e-cookies/
Think that lawsuit will get very far? Heck, Google's in bed with the NSA now since at least 2010... Big Brother is here.
For the past few years, I've limited myself to using only Google's search engine, and my YouTube and attached GMail account. I refused to use ANY of Google's installed apps (at least one version of Google Desktop used to scan networks and index the contents of other shared drives). Now, out of principal, I'm doing my best to sever the tentacles of Google's search engine permanently.
Did some research and found a few search engines that seem to value privacy and protect your IP address and search history. They even have very simple, short and easy to read privacy policies:
Ixquick.com
Gibiru.com
The latter is a Google proxy, and IXQuick also has one that proxies Google's searches:
https://www.startpage.com
Maybe nothing new here to some people, but I am enjoying using it. They also filter out Google's advertising spam from the search results, and Ixquick and startpage both have search engine add-ins for at least IE and Firefox which use HTTPS to encrypt your searches.
Anyway... maybe someone else will find this useful. Fuck Google...
