Our energy supplier is one of those who has collapsed & yesterday evening my wife received an email from the new supplier that Ofgem, or who ever, had placed us with.
My wife spends almost all of her internet time, on her phone & uses Google a fair amount. This morning, her Google news feed was full of news about both the new & old energy suppliers!!
So yesterday evening, a private email about old & new suppliers. This morning news about both suppliers filling her news feed. This has to be more than synchronicity, the connection has to be more than casual chance.
Beware of Google for itâs invading all of our privacy.
Surely you have not just found this out?
Try Googling tracking cookies which will follow you all around the web. Look at lawnmowers on Amazon expect to see ads for the same on Facebook. Mention Hawaiian Shirts in an email expect to see ads all over the place for them.
I use DuckDuckGo as a browser, for this very reason. I donât get tracked and I have set the laptop to clear everything when the tab is closed. I hardly get any ads as it is, never mind targeted ones. That must be so annoying.
I used to worry about that but donât anymore. I would if the tracking had been harmful to my way of life in any way over the 25 years Iâve been on the Internet but it hasnât been so far.
I use Startpage as a seach engine but for those using Google, itâs not only them who know what we do or where we go to on the Internet. All sorts of background servers are interconnected with the sites we visit and informing each other about our Internet travels and usage. However, all we are to them is an IP and/or e-mail address. A statistic rather than someone likely to know who you are personally.
I also use DuckDuckGo as a search engine rather than Google and for the same reasons. Cookies and History are cleared every other day. Any advertisements I may get are probably rejected by AdBlock. However, everybody will get the options re: Cookies whenever visiting a site requiring these to be downloaded on your computer. I always reject the first option of âAccept allâ in favour of âManage cookiesâ, on there I set the option to reject all of them other than those that are necessary for technical reasons, usually the on-screen appearance and functionality of the website.
The annoying problem I do get is when a website detects the use of AdBlock and refuses to allow viewing unless this is turned off. Whatâs the point of using that if it needs to be turned off so allowing advertising! Any site like that is remembered by me and I find another one for what I wanted originally.
That can be overcome by turning off JavaScript for the site. There are browser extensions for doing this. I use one called âJavaScript Toggle On and Offâ. Need to remember to turn JavaScript back on for most sites or they donât work as intended.
Me to. I also use ad blockers & place sites like Facebook within a container, so I can use it, but not leak information to them.
People keep telling me that other web browsers are as good as Firefox, but Firefox has numerous add onâs which allow you to maintain your privacy, Google would never allow developers to do this for Chrome.
Personally, I always accept when visiting a page, but my system simply drops them when I close the web browser. I then have an add-on which allows me to keep desirable cookies when my system closes & I routinely go through & add/ remove those that are wanted/unwanted.
I see cookies as a fair price to pay for a free site I wish to use, the same with limited advertising. But I will not allow targeted advertising & I will allow cookies from commercially operated sites to remain on my PC.
It doesnât bother me, every time you use your credit /debit card you leave a trail behind you that even a child could follow. Using a loyalty card saves me money, but Tesco know all about my life. I filled up with diesel at Thirsk on a day out, they even knew what I had for breakfast. They know all my likes and dislikes from my shopping habits, and they even know Iâve got a cat or if someone comes to stay with us.
Sat navs and smartphones know your exact location. I was surprised to find a list of every place Iâve ever visited since I bought the car. Every keystroke you make on your computer is remembered by some gadget somewhere whether you are on google or not. Very little of your life is secret, and Alexa will even spy on you in the privacy of your own home.
Thanks for that information Mart, I donât usually mess about with things like that. Itâs possible, without any extensions, on a Mac OS using Safari to just turn JavaScript on and off via Preferences and Security, if it is really necessary. Maybe if there was an extension where if turned off manually with the default being on it would be worth doing.
For e-mails I use gmail, all those are scanned and read by Google, that I am sure of. There have been references to e-mail content in the few ads Iâve had in the past. Thereâs not much I can do about that, other than using another e-mail provider, again a lot of messing about to change everything and the chances are the same will happen. Nothing on the internet is really secure, thereâs always a way it seems to gather information by one means or another.
A lot of sites use these things called âBotsâ, (Robots).
Once on your PC they funnel back info about what youâve been doing.
Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so good.
Hereâs a description:-
" The Good
One of the typical âgoodâ bot uses is to gather information. Bots in such guises are called web crawlers. Another âgoodâ use is automatic interaction with instant messaging, instant relay chat, or assorted other web interfaces. Dynamic interaction with websites is yet another way bots are used for positive purposes.
The Bad
Malicious bots are defined as self-propagating malware that infects its host and connects back to a central server(s). The server functions as a âcommand and control centerâ for a botnet, or a network of compromised computers and similar devices. Malicious bots have the âworm-like ability to self-propagate,â and can also:
Gather passwords
Log keystrokes
Obtain financial information
Relay spam
Capture and analyze packets
Launch DoS attacks
Open back doors on the infected computer
Exploit back doors opened by viruses and worms
Bots are usually used to infect large numbers of computers. These computers form a âbotnet,â or a bot network."
If you look at the big on line sellers, they use these to watch everything you look at, or buy.
You need to know when they are put on your machine.
They could be reading your keystrokes - and seeing what you use as passwords!
But you accept payment for that, in terms of the rewards, price discounts etc they give you. My daughter works for Tescoâs & I have a staff discount card via her, thus it has been worth my while using a Tesco card. What I earn in savings from them, feels like a fair price for the information they gather from me.
I hate that as well & never go there again & I do that, find another source, if Iâm really bothered about reading whatever the article was about., Itâs usually articles in newspaper that I have never bought or read except on a link.
Iâm not bothered about the Google cookies following me, it happens all the time, I just ignore them.
This is from a browser extension called Lightbeam (Thunderbeam in Chrome). It shows the sites visited and the number of third-party sites that hook into them. The circles are the sites visited. The triangles are third-party sites or servers. Places not directly visited.
Some triangles are external image sources needed for webpages, others are external links. Some are data/site usage gatherers. It can be seen how some of them interlink, probably passing details of site visitors to each other. This is just from an hour or so browsing around fairly common sites on the Internet. Imagine a week or more.
