How to prevent Google from tracking you. Much has been made of Google's new privacy policy, which takes effect March 1.
If you're concerned about Google misusing your personal information or sharing too much of it with advertisers and others, there are plenty of ways to thwart Web trackers. But what exactly are you thwarting? You don't become anonymous when you block tracking cookies, Web beacons, and the other identifiers as you browse. Your ISP and the sites you visit still know a lot about you, courtesy of the identifying information served up automatically by your browser.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers the Panopticlick service that rates the anonymity of your browser. According the the entropy theory explained by Peter Eckersley on the EFF's DeepLinks blog, 33 bits of entropy are sufficient to identify a person. When I ran Panopticlick's test on a Mac Mini, it reported 20.89 bits of identifiable information, which according to the entropy formula would be insufficient to identify me. What Google knows about you and how to tweak it. "Everyone who has a Google account should visit their Dashboard once a year," Google product manager Jonathan McPhie told me in a meeting room at Google's Chicago office.
"It's like Google's way of showing you our hand—let you see what info we have on you—and allow you to change it. " As the holidays draw near and people turn to the Internet to do their gift research and shopping, Google is on a renewed push to make users aware of the plethora of privacy settings available to them. But even when they're not trying to hide their jewelry purchases from their spouses, much of the general population is blissfully unaware of what can be done to keep their personal information in check.
"We want it to be something that your grandma can understand," McPhie said. Google's hand For something your grandma is supposed to understand, Google sure does spread its settings out into a million places. Who knew that I still had an Orkut account? Ad tracking But wait, there's more. Privacy Policy – Policies & Principles. There are many different ways you can use our services – to search for and share information, to communicate with other people or to create new content.
When you share information with us, for example by creating a Google Account, we can make those services even better – to show you more relevant search results and ads, to help you connect with people or to make sharing with others quicker and easier. As you use our services, we want you to be clear how we’re using information and the ways in which you can protect your privacy.
Our Privacy Policy explains: What information we collect and why we collect it. How we use that information. We’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible, but if you’re not familiar with terms like cookies, IP addresses, pixel tags and browsers, then read about these key terms first. Information we collect We collect information in the following ways: Information you give us.
How we use information we collect Transparency and choice.