Eaten alive by Google

James Whittaker wrote in his blog, why he left Google as an employee. It seems like the formerly innovative technology pioneer has turned into a company with a mission. The mission to spy in our privacy. Since Google is part of our daily life, it is rather easy for them to learn much about us. Openly we are telling Google, what we would like to know about via their search function. The rest, our location, technical details about our computer, our online accounts, and purchases is easy to get. Connecting these bits and pieces of information over a longer period of time, gives a complete picture about everyone’s life. The friends we have, the working hours, spare time, sleeping hours, and holidays are transparent to them. Spying even intrudes our mobile phones. They know whom we call and how long we speak.

With every Google search, they transmit 700kB highly streamlined javascript code to do this job on our computers. This code is made very efficiently and difficult to understand for a human. With a network protocol analyzer, I checked the transmitted packages during a Google search. Even though I spend a couple of hours with that, I failed in both cases, understanding their javascript code as well as the transmitted data.

Handling this avalanche of data is an impressive performance, and these fantastic computer scientists at Google deserve my deepest respect. What is more obvious than creating their own browser, Google Chrome, to handle that more efficiently?

For many years the threat exists, that online companies know too much about us. In 2008 even the German department of constitution warned users about Chrome browser’s data collection mania, behind the users back. In March 2012 Google has changed its privacy policy. While reading Google Chrome Privacy Notice I am shocked, how much data are already exchanged, even when I only start the browser.

Here are a few suggestions to circumvent the worst. I don’t want to allow them to run javascript on my computer and I want to keep it my secret, on which hit I click. When javascript is switched on in your web-browser, you can not easily see that you transmit data, when you follow a link. When javascript is off, the search results are links to a Google server, that forwards you to the intended web page, after collecting your data. You can see that, when you mouse over the links of their hits. To re-gain some minimal privacy, I use Firefox and some helpful plugins:

1. YesScript is a javascript blocker for specific web-sites. I entered all different Google pages from apis.google.com, over google.at/.de/.com until 1e100.org with both protocols, http and https.

2. I use FoxReplace to remove the Google brackets, the transmission of the clicked hits. Here is my regular expression for the FoxReplace settings: replace “/url\?q=(.*?)&.*?” with $1, as well as others to replace the url-encodings. If you want to know more details, let me know.

I know that this does not help much. At least it is more difficult for Google and others to spy on me. I also delete my browser’s history and my collected cookies from time to time. Sometimes I even consider to use Bing.com. One day I will be able to give a more detailed report about Google privacy intrusion, with the help of others, I hope.