Googley Woogeley

[Keith Mastin]

> Okay so how many people on this list use Google as their primary search
> engine?
> You are all talking ad infinitum about email privacy in relation to
> spam... what about the intrusion of cookies and spyder bots that harvest
> harvest email addresses off of servers, and proxy type spying.. where
> you use a search like google and they record all your information.

Huh? If your webpages are set up with email unhidden email addresses yes
it will probably eventually get farmed by a spambot.

My system doesn't send anything but the tcp/ip packets and request
parameters to google. Any fool with a heartbeat can get all that info
anyhow, so what's the beef?

> No this privacy issue is a major deal, and cannot be confined to the spam
> issue.
> I am surprised how in this discussion in relation to Microsoft how nobody
> brings up the fact that they promote a lot of this spying on you.
>
> Since I have installed windows xp on this one machine here, I got popups
> conrtinually advertising ironically that I should buy this popup filter.
> so I will not get these annoying popups anymore. Well I did not buy, I
> just went into kazaa and downloaded one and it works fine.

You stole it. It's a breach of copyright. Linux is built on copyright, and
it happens to be our stock in trade. Please do not advertise this behavior
on this list any more. It makes co-conspirators of all of us, and I
personally don't appreciate it.

> But really that is small potatoes compared to the spying that google does
> on us all.
>
> I do regular spyware checks on my system for anything I picked up while
> surfing, using Ad Aware and Spybot search and destroy. They seem to do
> the job working together, but still this whole cookie problem and sites
> like google I find very alarming.

That sounds like a lot of work to keep one machine afloat. Why not just
use an OS that you can configure to do what you want instead of adding a
bunch of junk on top of what already doesn't work?

> I am not a delusional parnoid, conspiracy theorist, but it does bother me
> that such sites like google are never challenged about their methods,
> and everyone seems to keep on using them, not to mention the fact that
> they never tell anybody what exactly they are doing with all this
> gleaned and harvested information.

Yes they do... here's the homework you should have done:
http://www.google.ca/privacy.html

> Yes indeed internet security and privacy issues are a LOT bigger..
> than spam...

The ones we have to worry about are yes. I wouldn't put cookies into this
mix though, it's just a little too paranoid for my tastes. You have the
options to refuse cookies or authorize each cookie or accept all cookies.
You also have the option to not use google or to allow it to scan your
website.

<snip>


-- 
Keith Mastin
BeechTree Information Technology Services Inc.
Toronto, Canada
(416)429 9304
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