Thanks!

What a great question, Jess! And as one who is,er used to be an avid Chrome user I can say that on the weekend recently past I made the switch from Chrome to Safari, as my default browser.

I loved Chrome… it’s memory is huge but it’s social profiling or data mining is also huge, thus I made the switch. FF or Opera are viable alternatives. So either swicth to these are take the following steps:

1) log out of google when not using it.
2) Pause your google history and search – in other words, Google Search, YouTube and Gmail history stop recording your every move.
3) be familiar with google’s privacy – http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/tools/
4) Use startpage or duckduckgo as alternate search engine’s. (as listed in my post)
5) Install a browser app – these are several that block about 500 trackers of your searches, history, etc like http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php

I have used Chrome and loved it… and I still like it as a browser but don’t like the way I feel compromised. DH and I are in the middle of trying to totally shift from google to alternatives, but ias we’ve been deep in the middle of the Big G for a few years now it isn’t a quick nor easy task, but one that we’re prepared to take a few weeks to do.

Thanks Mrs Prioli! We have another question for you: where does Google Chrome fit into all this? What browser do you use? We switched from IE to Firefox years ago because Firefox was better, but maybe two years ago Firefox wouldn’t let us type in a URL – it had to be a link you could click, otherwise you had to type it into a search engine on your home page or on your bookmarks bar, and go from there. So, we went to Google Chrome and have been quite happy with it, but now with all this Google… stuff going on, Mum and I are wondering if we should be using another browser.

Can you please shed some light onto our quandaries?
Thanks!
Jess

Hi Jess,
Lovely to have you drop by! Social Media is a hobby of mine… I use it a little but study it a lot. I often need to hear new things a few times before the ‘penny drops’. And this is what happened for me in this instance. I follow a few blogs who had talked about this ‘bubble’ effect. I didn’t take any notice for about 1 year. It wasn’t until I received a camera as a gift and went searching for information that I started to realise that my searches were very narrow. All my search results were for Christian or mummy bloggers who like photography whereas my husband was getting camera stores. So we noticed it gradually. but then I started to keep my eyes and ears open. Nowadays (I only homeschool one child now) I have a little more time on my hands and so I actively read this kind of information. I suspect that most homeschool mums aren’t aware of this though… they have their hands full with homeschooling. 😉

No, no such ‘wiki leak’ per se, only other bloggers who have noticed and write about it. And, things like the TED talk as contained in this blog post.

Thanks!
Jess

Thanks Kylie, I’ll be sure to look into the TOR Project 🙂