My Life without Google - Part II - Summary

Last week James wrote a post about his, "Life without Google." This has become one of our most popular posts of all-time and I thought it might be of benefit to write a second part where I summarize the comments (nearly 100) that were left in response. This discussion of privacy with our data will continue to grow as we enter the "tripoly" of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. Check out my privacy discussion from March where the question isn't how much Google knows about you, it's how much they don't know.

Alternative solutions to using Google for search:

• snap.com
• clusty.com
• dogpile.com (aggregates search results so should still remain anon from Google)
• ninja.com (uses a Google custom search)
• altavista (hrm, I didn't think anyone used this anymore and is altavista part of Yahoo?)
• scroogle.org
• webcrawler.com
• ixquick.com
• live.com ("almost as good as Google")
• Instead of using Google Analytics, try Mint or Extreme Tracking or one of the other tools we tested

Many of the comments appear to suggest that Yahoo was no better (maybe worse) with privacy data. If Google has this much data, how much does the ISP have!?!? I think we forget that the pipe we use holds all of the information, not just one company's data. Some of the comments discussed removing Adwords/Adsense by changing your hosts file.

Matt Cutts from Google discusses privacy within Google on his blog.

Here is the bottom line, this discussion is not at all about Google. It's about data. It's about the fact that when Google merges YouTube accounts into Google accounts, that data now is all pegged to the same record. Same thing with Yahoo and Upcoming or Flickr. When there were 100 small companies, each one only holds a small piece of your information. With 3 super-sized companies, they each hold basically all of your data. Will an employee at one of the big 3 be fired because their profile showed them browsing sites at home that the employer considers "inappropriate"?

How long before the data in our records is sold to product manufacturers? Actually it's already happening. What about the ISPs? We already know that companies like Hitwise get their data from the ISPs, to whom else are they selling our data to? This is the part that I think is the worry point. The ISP has it all. Maybe we should block our ISPs... oh wait. :)