Extricating Yourself From Google's Tentacles

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by Cormorant

Here's an interesting article on browser fingerprinting, with a link to Panopticlick, where you can test your broswer to see if it is uniquely identifiable. Mine is (!).

How Linux can help you protect your privacy online: Beating digital fingerprinting | News | TechRadar

And the link to Panopticlick:
https://panopticlick.eff.org

Funny, when you test a second time, you are again unique among all that have been tested…. meanwhile, they got you tracked for life

[Jerry Woodward]

Originally Posted by Azul

It even states in the Obamacare law that authorities can mine your records to look for "illegal" activity such as drug use.

This is nonsense. Please show me where in the ACA this is described? In fact, electronic medical records is one of the keys to reducing health care costs and may even save your life if you find yourself unconscious in a strange hospital.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Azul

I recently helped a friend change over to electronic health records instead of paper charts for his medical practice. Something like 70% of doctors have done this over the last few years as the government has provided a huge monetary incentive (about $40,000 for a solo practitioner over 5 years if all the standards are met yearly.)

Once you give your history to a doctor that has electronic records, the government will have access to your intimate personal health details, not just your BMI and BP. It even states in the Obamacare law that authorities can mine your records to look for "illegal" activity such as drug use.

Not to mention that most offices are using wifi to connect the examination room laptop to the server...

That's a tough one. One of the big problems in delivering healthcare is maintaining consistent and accessible records. There are big gains to be made in the quality of delivered care, reduction of medical errors, better control of prescriptions and the resulting reduction of overall costs by moving to a sensible electronic record system.

The risk is in the security of the deployed system, and the ability of government to set up a proper arms-length data repository that can function with some independence from government and political interference. That's a big ask these days...

[Azul]

Originally Posted by Jerry Woodward

This is nonsense. Please show me where in the ACA this is described? In fact, electronic medical records is one of the keys to reducing health care costs and may even save your life if you find yourself unconscious in a strange hospital.

Sorry, I don't work for you. Call it nonsense if you want, but I found this little gem when I was writing out a pain contract form. Feel free to look for it yourself.

At present, while I am sure the government can snoop into your records if you are running for Congress etc, your local ER doctor will NOT have access to your EHR.

Are EHR a good thing? I think so, I had them in 1996. But that doesn't mean they can't be abused by the government. Look how the IRS is abusing their power, and how little effort went into making the healthcare signup website secure.

[Macblaze]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

This is also really horrifying. There is actually nothing in my email which would be all that interesting to the authorities -- since I am a law-abiding person. So that means that I will avoid using encrypted email to avoid this intense scrutiny. Which means that I have no right to any real privacy, just because I am a law-abiding person and don't want to be treated like a criminal. Which means that the whole system is set up so that if you want any privacy, it must mean that you have something to hide. This is actually evil.

I can assure you as a former network/email admin that nothing, encrypted or not, that you write in an email is private. It's not like a letter that gets passed from post office to post office; more like a a photocopy that gets copied and passed along, copied again and gets passed along etc.

As someone mentioned earlier, there has been no privacy on the internet since the usenet days, and there never will. We used to have a veil of security in being small fish in an really big ocean. The issue now is good ol' America ingenuity is turning the ocean into a bathtub.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away...

[Cormorant]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Funny, when you test a second time, you are again unique among all that have been tested…. meanwhile, they got you tracked for life

Here's their explanation, from the FAQ. . . .


Q:

Why does your browser remain unique, even if you reload the page?

A:

As noted in the panopticlick privacy policy, the site uses a 3-month persistent cookie to try to prevent double-counting of browsers.
Now, you may ask, what about people who block cookies? If you block cookies and hit reload, your browser will be multi-counted in the live data at panopticlick.eff.org, which means that the numbers will be overly optimistic about how non-rare your broswer is.
We plan to do some analysis on the dataset to correct out these effects. One strategy would be to assume that the average number of reloads for a cookie-accepting user is the same as that for a cookie-blocking user. Another would be to use the encrypted IP addresses and fuzzy timestamps we have to try to recognise and discount cookieless reloads.
Once we've run these analyses, we'll publish public data on the overall uniqueness rates we've seen.

[IdoraKeeper]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

It just seems some smart legal eagle out there could come up with a way for each of us to copyright our personal info as intellectual property. Then they would have to pay us to resend the info anywhere. we would be owed $ for any use of it. I mean let's face it, Lady Gaga's name is copyrighted.... that would put a stop to it!
I'd love to see the jury trial; Google against John Doe. Google stole JD's property. They have hugely deep pockets. The Jury of your peers hates being invaded.... I think Google would loose.

You have hit the nail on the head.......now if we could only stop Lady Gaga…

[hellosailor]

z-
"it still welcomes me under that name....and i cannot change it..... "
If you mean, YT is 'recognizing" you, and you can't stop that, that probably just means there's some type of cookie you aren't aware of. Most folks don't know that Adobe Flash also saves persistent cookies, sometimes it is that simple, you just don't have any idea where the stuff is.

cheechako-
There's limits to what can be copyrighted. But some states also have laws that make it illegal for anyone to make commercial use of your "identity". I can't just take your picture and then make you into the new "Coppertone Girl" for my new sunblock, in most cases. You'd have to explore your state laws and then take hostages in your state legislature to get them tightened up a bit. But if no one takes hostages, ergh, protests, no one will pass new laws.

The panopticlick web page is outright frightening. Good lord, fingerprinting computers by reading the font list...Not to worry, using a fresh 'virtual machine' session that saves nothing and has no custom features will solve that too. There are browsers that install and run from a USB stick "plain vanilla" which should also help that.

I'd like to see an EFF project, or a hacker project, that created a "random cookie exchange" online. You log in, it looks at whose cookies are on your computer, and it randomly exchanges them with other cookies, collected from other users, so that whoever is reading the cookies for marketing and tracking? Gets results scrambled as thoroughly as eggs.

[Sea_Green]

I'm a Google Glass explorer, so one could say that I've been assimilated.

[Nicholson58]

Even NSA & HS can't escape Google. The danger is when the MIB start recruiting from Google.

[senormechanico]

Originally Posted by IdoraKeeper

You have hit the nail on the head.......now if we could only stop Lady Gaga…

Lady Gaga is sooo last year.
The current mess is Miley Cyrus.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

I'd like to see an EFF project, or a hacker project, that created a "random cookie exchange" online. You log in, it looks at whose cookies are on your computer, and it randomly exchanges them with other cookies, collected from other users, so that whoever is reading the cookies for marketing and tracking? Gets results scrambled as thoroughly as eggs.

Firefox has a "Private Browsing" mode. It's intended to permit browsing without leaving any history or cache on the user's computer when the private session is closed. I'm not certain whether it also starts you off with zero cookies.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

So I have deleted the account altogether, which means 10 years of Youtube videos are gone (but I have them stored in other places and can repost them).



Anyone else been through this? Any useful experience to share?

I havent read any other posts on this thread yet, theres too many.
I am having the same problem.
Not only that, but on my real website (actually I have two) i am finding it very difficult to get cross platform videos to work as Apple hates microsoft and flash and all that ********. So youtube is one of the easy ways to have a video in one format uploaded so it works on many formats.

If somone has a way I can host my own videos NOT on youtube, AND be cross platform I would like it.

Yes, there are some vids I dont want on a youtube search engine let alone Google etc.

I am getting so pissed off at all the aps and website that want ALL my contacts! How dare they! my mums private phone number is NOT for every bastard on the internet!

[hellosailor]

"The danger is when the MIB start recruiting from Google. "
Why would they start recruiting from a wholly owned subsidiary? Confused. (G)

Kinda like the big fuss last year when people "discovered" the NSA were buying cell phone records. I guess they forgot the older news about how the NSA had bought into duplicate feeds and secret rooms in data centers and longlines...or maybe they'd also forgot the news when the simple existence of the NSA became public, along with their mission. Which, oddly enough, hasn't changed. Apparently they've simply been doing what they are mandated to do, and doing it well. (Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, is perhaps the more important discussion.)

To me the big difference between Lady GaGa and Miley Cyrus is that Cyrus is just acting out. GaGa, love her or leave her, has been incredibly creative and original in many ways. It is hard not to give her credit for that. She puts on a hell of a show for the fans.

But there's a definite cost to safety and anonymnity on the web. Heck, if you want to watch Amazon's streaming video, you can't run high level security. You have to enable JavaScript and then...I suppose somewhere on the web are more instructions for using a virtual machine, vpn, portable applications, and wiping sessions so as to better anonymize things. I'll be curious to see if Phil Zimmerman's "blackphone" project and "Darkmail" ever come to prime time, as well.

It is nice that cookies and ads pay the freight for running this and other forums. But perhaps time that they all got together and considered, if us villagers take up pitchforks and torches, that's not going to be good for them in the long run. There have to be some limits on the datamining and sneaking.

[Therapy]

Originally Posted by Jerry Woodward

This is nonsense. Please show me where in the ACA this is described? In fact, electronic medical records is one of the keys to reducing health care costs and may even save your life if you find yourself unconscious in a strange hospital.

It won't. Sorry.

I am going to be busy so may have to explain later.

Maybe someone else that is using it or following it will do it for me (please).
Thanks.