Easy ways out
It’s very easy to stop giving your web and map searches to the Google.
More often than not, quitting an online service altogether will be an inconvenient, isolating experience. By abandoning one network or another we may lose the ability to contact others or be forced to do so over old fashioned channels like email or have to meet them in person.
There may be equivalent (and probably better) services available, but that point is moot if the people with whom you want to commune are not using them. So rather than completely severing ties with a given proprietary service and exclusively using the alternative in general, it’s easier to use the more wholesome alternative service in parallel with the one you’d rather move away from, all the while dropping subtle hints for others to do the same. For example, it’s easy to have multiple email accounts, and change the reply-to addresses on those that live in proprietaryville, using ever more aggressive passive-aggressive tones at those that continue to use them.
That said there are some services that can easily be abandoned. Google introduced a unitary privacy policy back in 2012, which means that your interactions with all its services are all tied to a single Google ID. This certainly makes for a simpler privacy policy, but also allows for much more effective data mining. If you use your Google ID with Google Chrome browser or even if you just keep your Google account logged in, e.g. through an always open Gmail tab, then all your Google and Map searches are stored and cross-referenced with the rest of your Google profile so that appropriate ads can be foisted upon you. These search data are easily found on the Dashboard in the My Account page, as are audio snippets of any uses of ‘OK Google’ functionality from an Android phone. An individual’s search queries can be very telling, given that they might search for medical conditions, bankruptcy advice or directions to their hotel. While these
“Your interactions with all Google’s services are tied to a single Google ID.”
details are never sold to anyone, the fact that they are stored at all is a concern.
You might not want to stop using all of Google’s services, but it’s easy to switch to a more privacy conscious search engine. One such engine that has become very popular is DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com) which is now serving over 12 million requests every day. DDG has soared in popularity thanks to its policy of not collecting or sharing personal information. Not only is DuckDuckGo easy to add to your favourite web browser’s search box, but if you’re unsatisfied with its search results then it can easily provide Google results instead—just prefix your search query with !g . This will be passed to Google’s encrypted search page, which won’t pass unencrypted referrer data to any ads or search results you click on, but it is still Google, so that data is passed to HTTPS sites, and will be stored by Google (you can’t get away from Google by continuing to use it). A number of other providers can be searched via the ! syntax. These are known as bangs, and a list of over 9,000 providers are available at https://duckduckgo.com/bang.