There are ways to keep Google off your digital trail
Other search engines offer more privacy than the online giant
Google is riding a wave of unpopularity. The European Union and the U.S. Senate both think it’s guilty of uncompetitive activities and Canadian media companies accuse it of stealing news and undermining their advertising revenues. Privacy groups assail Google for stealthily amassing huge amounts of personal data which it sells to advertisers and uses to direct ads at anyone using the internet.
Yet despite all the mistrust and accusations, Google is still used by most people to find anything on the internet. On an average day it completes about 3.5 billion search requests, which is about 63,000 queries per second. It also owns YouTube and supplies numerable free services such as Google Maps, Google Docs, online cloud storage at Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Books and Music, Gmail, and the Android operating system which runs most of the world’s smartphones and tablets
Google counters that all of the personal data it collects is acquired, mined, organized, and utilized by an impersonal mass of computers and none of it is analyzed by humans.
However, you may be concerned that you are a part of Google’s impersonal, all-pervasive data collection and wealth accumulation system. If you are uneasy about being tracked across the internet, you can obscure your digital trail.
Google is not the only search engine in the world. There are plenty of others. One of the most notable is DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) which vows to never store or share any information about you with anyone. All searches are confidential and you can download the DuckDuckGo browser extension for your computer or get the customized web browser for your mobile device.
Another non-tracking search engine is Start Page (www.startpage.com) which is based in Holland and claims to be the “world’s most private search engine.” StartPage pays Google to use its search engine but acts as an intermediary and strips out all information about you before submitting the search to Google.
StartPage and DuckDuckGo are both profitable and make money by displaying links paid for by advertisers in their search results.
Want to search, not be tracked, and do something to benefit the world and fight climate change? Then try Ecosia (www.ecosia.org) which makes money the same as DuckDuckGo but uses all of the profits to plant trees in areas where they are needed to “benefit people, the environment, and local economies.” This would seem to be a search engine that almost demands to be used by anyone with a social and environmental conscience.
Chances are the default search engine in your internet browser is either Google or Microsoft’s Bing, but you can make it whatever search site you want to use. It’s not difficult but the steps are slightly different in each browser so goto the Hello Tech website(www. hello tech. com) which has complete, illustrated instructions for each browser, including Apple’s Safari.
To further minimize Google’s tracking, make sure not to signin to the Google Chrome browser since this allows Google to also record which websites you visit. Click on the little head icon in the upper right of the Chrome browser and make sure you are not signed-in.
The European Union enacted a privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation that restricts how personal data is collected and handled. Until we get similar legislation, the best you can do is take steps on your own to control what Google is collecting about you.
If you have a Google account, which you do if you use any Google services, you can see what information Google has collected about you. Go to Google Accounts (accounts.google.com), sign in with your Gmail log in, and peruse the various areas in the Data and Personalization area. You’ll notice that you can pause Location tracking which allows Google to know everywhere in the world where you’ve used a Google service, a laptop, or your Android device, and plot it on a map. You can also make changes to what else is collected about you and delete much of what has been saved.
The depressing aspect of hiding from Google is that you will still see ads; they just won’t be based on your personal interests or searches.
Despite all the mistrust and accusations, Google is still used by most people to find anything on the internet