Google’s Machinae

Besides a lot of rpg postings lately, the world hasn’t stopped rotating, hasn’t stopped moving onwards and it’s already end of January, 2009 again. Hell, time if flying by it seems. A lot of things change and not always for the better, that’s true for so many things and usually you at least have the chance to recognize these changes. Then again, there are large companies and I think we all don’t have illusions to  think companies are not dictating the rules in this world, or?

Yesterday I’ve learned a nice example from my girlfriend over at the Vienna Writer’s Blog, Google has recently changed a little in their privacy statement and they started logging every single activity you’re actually doing with any of their applications. Of course only to prevent harmful sites and protect the users from fraud…
Even if this would be true, I would have appreciated a single statement on it – just a few words on the change instead of correcting it overnight without any notice to the users themselves. So I’ve used Google for most searches online, been using google-reader for some while and will switch now. This has just given me a few moments to think about how much information a single AAA-corp is collecting on me and I’ll start using alternative search engines (ask.com looks nice imho) and use different rss applications, I’ll start with netvibes.com instead of iGoogle – I know this won’t be a lot better but I just didn’t like the way this went recently… Just imagine what it really means, every mobile-phone using google maps for navigation purpose will be collecting time and place where you are staying at and for how long (in case you’re having the application active). I simple don’t want somebody to know all of my habits and stuff. Maybe you just think about it as well.

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