This Google Privacy Thing

Right, with a certain level of mild hypocrisy seeing as I write this blog on one of Google's major data collecting sites (AKA Blogger or Blogspot), it's about time to try and do something to avoid the internet's dominant player from collecting / collating / distributing all that personal information.


As it was once put - "If your getting something for free, you're not a customer. You're the product." So, dear Google search engine with your marvellous algorithms and massively invasive cookies, you have to go.


There's an informative set of suggestions of how to avoid the GoogleMonster in this article - some are more fiddly to accomplish than others, but the simplest thing to do is just to stop using the world's biggest search engine and use a different one.

It might take a little bit of getting used to, but at Millbrooker Towers we're trying out DuckDuckGo which we've made into the default search engine; so even when we're using Google Chrome as the browser, if we put a search term "easy mandolin chords" for example into the browser search bar, it's DuckDuckGo that does the job, leaving no trail of what we've looked for so Google can't sell the information to advertisers in order that we get bombarded with crap.


Idiot's guide to changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo for Google Chrome users:


Go to www.duckduckgo.com
Bottom right of screen, click "Chrome" and follow the pop up instructions.
Whole thing takes about a minute.


Meantime, if we find we don't really get on with DuckDuckGo, which is entirely possible, there are a myriad other search engines which don't have Google's invasive non-privacy policies. We'll just try another.


Happy hunting.