Privacy, Google, and Web Browsers

[davidbrady]

I've been finding it more and more disturbing that after I Google something I'm often inundated with spam emails from vendors wanting to sell me the same or a related item. I find it really creepy. We all know that Google sells adwords and from the beginning they stored our search strings to help sell their adwords, but lately they've taken it a step further. Now it seems they're storing our search histories along with IP addresses, email addresses, and other personal identifiers so that advertising can be directed to a specific user. Of course all this stored information is available to whoever buys it or subpoenas it. This is made worse by running Chrome on our PC's. With Chrome Google has the ability to write and read data directly to and from our machines. So, I deleted Chrome from all my machines and I'm weaning myself off Google. There are other viable alternatives which sprang up specifically to address these privacy issues. I'm now running Pale Moon as my web browser and I tend to use DuckDuckGo for my search engine. Both have very appealing privacy policies of not collecting and storing search histories along with associated users IP addresses and other persona ID information. I'm fed up with Google building a profile of every user, selling it to advertisers, or giving it to the NSA. The Google feature I miss most is, "Do no evil"!