What a Day!

Sometimes it's fun to let my readers into some personal nuggets before jumping right in to Library orientated materials. I hope it keeps people coming back to read here!

Turns out today I have plenty of free time to blog. My car got busted into last night. The S.O.B. punched my lock in and stole my CD player. I hope he (or she) electrocutes himself with it. And with the heating unit on the fritz, i have plenty of time to set around and blog while i wait for the repair guy.

I've been on a Google free diet for almost 6 days on my computer. Believe me, its hard to do. Google has its fingers in sooo much stuff. Google is a great engine, but I disagree with their privacy policies, or lack thereof, really. And the more I read about em the more I grow wary of the "Don't be evil" giant. For those who wish to rid themselves of Google's gathering tendrils, I have four suggestions:

1. Use search engines that protect your privacy. Ixquick.com wipes their database of search results every 48 hours. Ixquick is a meta-search engine, actually. It crawls other search engines. Clusty.com is nice too. They don't track the IPs of who uses their engine, and they have a feature that organizes similiar results into "clusters," which is pretty swanky. No crawling through one big list to find the pages you want.

2. Beware the Firefox. Firefox is heavily in bed with Google, as is evident by the Google search engine appearing on the firefox homepage by default. However, Mozilla-firefox is still independent... for now. There is some literature suggesting that Firefox eventually plans to stream an adbanner in the actual browser, all supplied with specially tailored ads from Google. The sources I've seen so far aren't terribly credible, so i wouldn't freak over this one yet, but its something to keep an eye on. My advice, get comfortable with a new browser now.

3. Delete the Google Cookie. Blocking it doesn't do much good from my experience, so just delete it when it pops on your computer and try to stay off Google. This damn cookie takes two years to expire, and if you use Google services that require log in, the cookie associates your new location with the old one and continues to compile information on you.

4. Speaking of Google services, avoid Gmail. Google saves every email you send or receive. Even if you delete the email, Google keeps it. And, with email no longer being a protected form of correspondence, they can pretty much do what they want with it.

Since I went Google-free and decided to protect my privacy I've gotten a lotta crap to the tune of "Only someone who has something to hide protects their privacy." Seems most people don't understand the importance of privacy in their lives- to information searching, democratic processes, etc. I don't want someone reading my mind- which is essentially what happens when someone reads a list of search results.