If, like me, you’re getting a little bored with Big Brother watching all the time and really wish he would get bored, too, I’ve discovered a few things you can do today. I can’t vouch for whether or not other search engines are doing similar things, but Google/YouTube keep coming out with doozies.
For example, I discovered this morning that Laura Bruno’s Blog has its own YouTube channel, which, no, I did not create. It had somehow managed to link this account to a gmail address that I have never made public and that I’ve only used so far to receive a few Sprint iPhone bills. I will be changing that over and deleting my gmail account as soon as I have time to wade through that red tape. I haven’t figured out how to delete the YouTube channel, since I didn’t even know I had one anymore!
I find this YouTube channel both disturbing and ironic. Last Summer, YouTube terminated my own channel, falsely censoring my videos for supposed “repeated copyright infringement.” I’ve mentioned this fact before: despite repeat attempts to contact YouTube and Google about the impossibility of copyright infringement when I was telling my own story and observations as a Medical Intuitive and sharing my own painted doors, they refused to reinstate the channel I actually created. Yet now, somehow, it’s fine for YouTube to create its own channel “on my behalf,” which just happens to list every single video I’ve posted since March 2011 — even videos posted on entries I’ve since removed from this site.
Further down the creepy Google/YouTube chain: the day after I posted how to remove the Google and YouTube search history prior to the new non-Privacy Policy of March 1, 2012, my gmail subscribers suddenly stopped getting my blog posts delivered to their email boxes. David has a gmail account and subscribes to this blog. So far as we can tell, that had never happened before, but it did right after I sent out that post about protecting yourself from Google and YouTube tracking. After some investigation with WordPress and individual gmail subscribers, we found that my posts were now quarantined as “Spam,” but only to gmail subscribers. Several of them clicked “Not Spam,” and they appear to be getting my posts again. Coincidence? If so, an odd one.
Today, I read about Google’s ‘Ambient Background’ Spy-Tech and decided, “Enough is Enough.” Again.
Even though I never chose Google as my search engine, it came up automatically, every time on my iPhone and my laptop. I found, to my dismay, that removing Google as my default search engine took some effort. Even when I set Yahoo as my home page, for example, Google continued to run the searches on my laptop. I tried installing Dogpile as my laptop homepage, and lo and behold, there was Google, still searching and tracking away! Google started to feel like an uninvited guest who not only refuses to leave the party, but also starts to dig through your lingerie drawer, auction your private things on ebay and scope out your house for future break-ins. In a time of corporate personhood, I’d consider this Google guy a class A stalker.
I finally found out how to switch from Google to Yahoo as a default search engine on my iPhone. You can find instructions for that here.
I use Mozilla Firefox as a laptop browser, and I’m not super-techie, so it took me awhile to solve the laptop dilemma. Eventually, I clicked the Google-logo’d drop-down link in the upper right-hand corner, which offered me Google first and Yahoo second. By this time, I didn’t really want Yahoo or Google on my laptop as search engines. I’ve had run-ins with Yahoo before, though not anywhere near as major. In order to get the big guys off my auto-tab, I had to click on Manage Search Engines and then selected each of them (Yahoo and Google) for “Remove.” In need of a new search engine, I then clicked the link “get more search engines.” From there I managed to add Dogpile as my default. I used Dogpile many years ago, and it professes to combine top searches from all the major search engines. I don’t know their privacy policy, but given how much Google appears to be tracking us these days, I figured I’d give someone else a try. I like that Dogpile donates money to animals in need. I’d much rather support dogs, bunnies and kitty cats than all the Bigs, including Big Brother.
I also discovered that you can go into “Tools” on Firefox and then select “Options.” From there you can customize your “Privacy” settings, including options that say, “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked” and “Always use private browsing.”
Later, I found this other thing, which I’ve not used myself. WordPress automatically tracks referrals to any WordPress blog, but apparently, if you don’t want anyone to know how you found their site, you can type href.li in front of the blog url in order to hide your referrer. I don’t know how that works, but I can say that it does appear to work. When I click on the WordPress referral link, only the instructions to hide the referrer come up, not the referrer itself.
So, there you have it! If you’ve got gmail and you don’t see posts from me for awhile, you might want to check Spam, in case Big Brother dumps me there for awhile. I don’t feel overly upset or fixated on this privacy issue. It just feels good to say a firm, “No, thank you, and get out” so that I can refocus on all the “Yes, please, come in” opportunities in life these days. Peace!
Laura Bruno's Blog 