Fuzzy Thoughts of David

Is it Time to Switch from Google?

This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) concerning the new Google privacy policy:

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

via How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Let me say at the outset that I love Google. I use quite a few Google products. However, this news, well, seems a bit creepy to me. I’ve had web history turned on since 2005 and I found that I’ve had a lot of searches. Sometimes it was even nice to go back through “memory lane” and see what I searched for and when.

There wasn’t anything I wanted to hide in my search history, but this article from EFF did cause me to pause. Then I went and deleted almost seven years of search history. I was a bit sad to do it. Yet, I didn’t want my search history connected to my YouTube account, and my Picaso account, etc., etc., etc.

I don’t know that Google will do anything wrong with the data, it’s just that it seemed…a bit…creepy. To realize that at some point all the dots of data could be connected to create a type of “profile” of who I was, what I liked, etc., just made me feel uneasy.

Started to make me wonder if I should switch from my current search engine, to something different.

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