What Does Google REALLY Know About You?

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Google has rolled out My Activity, it’s a tool showcasing your search activity. You’re able to manage your activity, including saving your Chrome browsing history from websites and apps that use Google services.

It includes your youtube searches, location history, even your voice and audio activity. While you can pause what Google sends you for personalized ads, that doesn’t mean the ads will stop altogether; they’ll still send you the same number of ads, just not as relevant to your personal tastes.

So, What’s a Researcher To Do?
Habits die hard, if you can’t help yourself and Google’s your go-to, utilize the My Activity and check on it regularly to make sure your settings are in check. Take a peek at these 3 and see how private search suits you.

Duck Duck Go
Hatching in 2009, DuckDuckGo began an idea for better searching and less spam. They made a bold move and decided not to collect or share personal information from users. They now average over 5 million searches a day. Apple began including DuckDuckGo in Safari in 2014 with Mozilla following suit a few months later.

Tor
While not a search engine, Tor, according to their website, is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Yippy:
This search engines searches other search engines for you. If you have a hard-to-find hobby, blogs or obscure government content, this is the search engine for you. Put protections on from Tor and let Yippy search all the search engines for you.

When cookies get stored in your search history, it allows for ads to follow you onto multiple platforms including Facebook, (sometimes for months…) Utilizing these tools can greatly reduce the amount of spam (unwanted ads) coming into your feed. If a computer that’s rarely used contracts malware from careless search, be certain to dispose of it properly with hard drive destruction services offered by SecurShred.