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| -Election 2012 |
| If you use Google apps, read this |
| 2012-06-15 |
| A while ago Google announced they would track and correlate all user data and activity that flows through their servers - i.e. from searches but also from gMail, gMaps, gCalendar, Youtube etc. Now Google's CEO is advising the Obama campaign on how to shape their message effectively. If you use gMail on your PC or smartphone, or any of the other Google apps, keep this in mind. The Obama campaign is extensively mining data about voters. The combination of Google's data mining expertise and your personal information is a powerful campaign contribution to re-electing the present POTUS. Although it's an annoying limitation on my own smartphone use, I refuse to send my email and calendar through Google apps to my phone for this reason and I turn off GPS location tracking on the phone nearly all the time. |
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| #15 You might try startpage.com, which uses google but doesn't pass through your IP or allow tracking coookies. |
| Posted by: KBK 2012-06-15 21:17 |
| #14 I started using Bing a couple of years ago (over Google's willingness to celebrate Picasso's birthday, etc., but not American patriotic holidays). I've been pleased. A couple of times, I just couldn't find what I needed on Bing, and tried on Google. Guess what? They didn't have it either. I don't think I've been on Google in over a year. Don't intend to ever go back. |
| Posted by: Barbara 2012-06-15 18:06 |
| #13 The decision to track data is the whole reason these things are invented, down to your statistical preference in farmville. Sure they make some money on ads, but info is gold. Its why I don't do that. I have a nice little fire-resistant locking safe I keep backups in, any more data storage is so easy. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2012-06-15 17:12 |
| #12 What does Siri use to do a search? The move to smart phones might change the paradagm and allow a decent search to sneak in in a way that couldn't happen on the desktop. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2012-06-15 14:42 |
| #11 Ebbang Uluque6305, problem with Word and Excel is they embed all sorts of information into the documents that get transfered over to pdf unless you know what you're doing. They need that turned off as a default if you ask me. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2012-06-15 14:41 |
| #10 Bing is pretty good and rapidly getting better as it learns from user feedback. And Microsoft is, unlike Google, pretty pro-American, willing to show the flag yesterday on Flag Day etc. |
| Posted by: lotp 2012-06-15 14:15 |
| #9 If my google search results are common, O's next speech should be dirty as hell. |
| Posted by: flash91 2012-06-15 13:05 |
| #8 Hard drives are pretty cheap. I have found them more reliable that solid state memory devices or home-burned optical media. I have a dozen around here which I use to back up my working disc drives. Off site storage: safe deposit box. No mention of encryption as a possible way to safeguard items stored in the Cloud. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-06-15 12:32 |
| #7 Pearl and P2K are both right. Storage these days is getting cheaper and more efficient all the time. I believe that solid state disk drives are the way to go. In essence, they are non-volatile memory with no moving parts. To query a database, then, is more like reading memory than a disk drive. Therefore, you no longer have to worry about striping the data across the shallow end of multiple spinning disks to avoid the performance hit of reading deep into the disk. That means all those terabytes that you buy are used far more efficiently with far less waste. Back up your data as many ways as you can to tape and other storage devices and, if you can afford it, replicate it to a spare server offsite for smooth disaster recovery. Further, as much as it galls me to promote Microsoft, when you use Word or Excel you know where your files are and you don't have to worry about some goon at some disk farm across the continent looking at them. But then, there are open source office suites that you could run on Linux too. To back up your PC, you can buy USB thumb drives these days that will hold up to 32GB. That figure, of course, is probably obsolete as I write this rant and you will soon see thumb drives that will take 64GB. A lot of small businesses could run their entire database on a device like that. You don't need no stinkin' cloud. I know will guarantee that nothing will go wrong with the cloud and that they will never lose your data. But they said the Titanic wouldn't sink too. That guarantee will be meaningless when they do lose your data. Sooner or later, to somebody somewhere, it will happen. They could never replace your business. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2012-06-15 12:12 |
| #6 The time may have come for another search engine. I used to like Lycos in the early days. I just checked and it seems they are still in business. Never cared much for Yahoo. There was a lot of competition back in the 90's but Google eventually crushed them all. Raising the money for a viable start up to challenge them now could be a daunting task but competition is always good. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2012-06-15 11:48 |
| #5 ...however, if its important data, you need an offsite alternate storage in case of disaster, natural or man-made. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2012-06-15 11:10 |
| #4 I don't even trust "cloud". If you are an IT person, keep your data the same way you should keep your gold. Close. |
| Posted by: Pearl Clith3338 2012-06-15 10:51 |
| #3 One question, Which came first, the decision to track user data or the decision for the Obama administration to data mine. Seems to me the two go hand in glove together and Google and the other left coast techies are deeply in bed with the Dems...perhaps in the useful idiot role of being handsomely rewarded for the technology to create oppression and totalitarianism? They support an agenda for which they have not thought about the consequences. It is as if they think no one but Democrats will ever be elected POTUS and the Republicans whom they loathe and dismise will have access to this stuff when they are elected. Shallow, vain thinking about the realities of society and culture will lead to the logical and absurd end of limited freedom and despair. |
| Posted by: Bill Clinton 2012-06-15 10:48 |
| #2 1984 is not a myth, if we don't get this election done, it will be 1984 everywhere. I think we need some privacy laws about data mining. I am personally ill over this. I refuse to use Google because of their political posturing. |
| Posted by: Bill Clinton 2012-06-15 10:28 |
| #1 Google should concentrate on fixing their search engine. Their bread and butter. Seems now the thing produces pages and pages of tangental results. Where once they were awesome in their accuracy now they lead only because other search engines are unknown or lame. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2012-06-15 10:17 |