Posted on 11/12/2023 8:51:26 AM PST by Paal Gulli
There’s a setting on your phone and web browser that Google is desperate to keep you from discovering. How desperate? In 2021 alone, Google paid Apple, Samsung and others $26.3 billion to keep it buried.
That’s more money each year than McDonald’s makes selling burgers.
This setting affects who gets to track your location and watch what you look up online. It affects the usefulness of the information you see and how much of your screen is taken up by ads.
I’m talking about your search engine — what pops up the answers when you type into the search bar. Google pays the makers of phones, laptops and browsers to be your default and to stop them from even presenting you other options during setup...
...You might be wondering: So what? Google has a reputation for good results, in part because it has data from so many users. What’s so bad about making Google the default?
What we’re learning from the trial flips that question on its head. If Google’s so good, then why does it need to spend as much as all the Big Macs combined to make sure we never even consider the alternatives? What have we been missing while Google has been our default? And how would we know if something better came along?..
...The biggest price we pay for monopolies is that they limit better ideas in ways we’ll never get to know.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Bkmk
https://medium.com/@re_53711/seven-simple-steps-toward-online-privacy-20dcbb9fa82
Browsing and seach - use Brave --> https://search.brave.com/
Email - use Proton --> https://proton.me/mail
Texting and video calls - use Signal --> https://signal.org/
Brave is the default on my one-year-old Samsung cell phone I recieved for my 89th birthday last year...
Since it was my first smart phone (definitely miss that 12-year-old flip phone I gave up), I handed it to my daughter (an IT engineer of some sort) as she had said she would set it up for me...
Turns out that she was busy and she handed it off to my 23-year-old granddaughter (who is in medical school & was home for Thanksgiving) who accomplished the task...
Granddaughter will be home again in a couple of weeks for Thanksgiving (and my 90th) and I’ll get the details from her...
Now you have to sift through screens of paid ads to get to the result you are searching for. Unless, of course, the site you are looking for paid enough to Google to move up the list.
Why post this article? IT’S BEHIND A PAY WALL! We can’t see it.
I would like to find out the same thing, but the article is behind a pay wall.
Bezos sees Google as competition for having control of our data!
Startpage hides your info from google
If you want tracking protection, etc., install the app.
Will do. Thx.
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