Posted on 08/14/2006 12:32:55 AM PDT by Eagle9
Don Fullman finished off a cinnamon roll and iced tea at the St. Louis Bread
Co. in Winchester on Friday morning and talked about some of the things he's
looked up recently on the Internet.
Bile duct cancer, aneurysms, substance abuse.
"If you took that out of context . . . it would look like I'm a wreck and I'm
not going to live much longer," said Fullman, a self-described healthy
60-year-old from Ballwin, whose laptop computer sat open on the table. "If
that's winding up under my name personally, that's a little scary."
Many people might not realize that every time they enter a word or phrase into
an online search engine, they leave behind a trail of clues about themselves.
"You are turning over when you do searches . . . . a lot of information," said
Ari Schwartz, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit public
policy organization. "It seems as though you're just dealing with a computer,
but in reality, on the other side, that information will be stored and
collected. We forget that sometimes."
The public got a sharp reminder recently when AOL, an Internet service company,
released more than 20 million search queries made by 658,000 customers over a
three-month period.
AOL posted the data on its research site in late July...
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Does anyone know of a search engine that doesn't do this?
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Ummmm...Google, Yahoo, etc. have not turned over the internet searches.
Only AOHELL has.
Purging your cookies and, if possible, changing IP addresses frequently will minimize the chances of a search engine figuring out very much about you.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
2) If you run MSIE, open the browser. go to
TOOLS
Internet Options
Privacy
Sites
3) In the box "Address of Website", enter the first one from the log. An example is "247realmedia.com". Click the ALWAYS BLOCK box.
Repeat for all entries.
The first time you scan, you will see a LOT of them, and it looks like a lot of work, but it is worth it, because the next time you scan, say in a week, you will see a FEW of them. Repeat the above process.
In a few weeks you will only see a few feeble entires. Kill them, and continue to check weekly. You only have to do it once for each pest site.
The beauty of this method, rather than just killing all cookies, is that friendly sites, like Freerepublic, continues to remember you at login, and you can "Target" only the bad ones, just as these marketing scum are trying to do to you.
I want Google, Dogpile, etc. to remember what I was doing for a short while, but not for days.
Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean they don't love me...Hahaha.
I have a problem with Google. They support MoveOn.org, whether I ever click their ads or not and are thus tainted in my value system. A great search engine, to be sure.
But I feel so dirty after I use it.
bttt
Damn the machine, please.
Okay, I understand. It won't happen again.
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