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Filed under: Google

How to opt out of Google and protect your privacy: Move to remote village

Google Opt Out
Google may be the top search engine in the world, and it may collect a lot of data about you if you use its email, chat, photo, or video services. Heck, even if you've avoided every Google product, Google probably still knows a few things about you if you've ever done anything that might have possibly left a trail on the web.

But America's finest news source, The Onion, lets us know that Google has a new service that lets you opt out. All you have to do is click the opt-out button and a van will show up at your door and relocate you to a remote 22 acre village where you'll be expected to sever all contact with the outside world. Your home will be destroyed to protect your privacy.

You can check out The Onion's satirical video after the break. Sure, it's all a joke. But you know what? It does highlight just how difficult it is to stay off the grid in the age of the internet.

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Filed under: Security, Web services

PrivacyChoice opts you out of third-party cookies

After surfing the web day in and day out, you've probably piled up a lot of advertising cookies. A lot of major ad providers, like Google, for example, save cookies and track browsing activity to provide better ad targeting. Unless you know that you can opt out of this stuff, you don't have much of a choice about this stuff. Privacychoice has collected the opt-out features of a lot of major advertisers in one convenient button, so you can stop all of their cookies at once.

Privacychoice works by giving you blank cookies for all of the sites on its list, so they don't have any information about you, but they also don't try to set new cookies without asking you. Sure, you could just set your browser to block ALL third-party cookies, but maybe you have some non-advertising sites with cookies you care about. Privacychoice is a way to get rid of annoying cookies without giving up the good ones. Be sure to switch off your ad-blocker when you're setting up Privacychoice, but go ahead and turn it back on when you're done.

Filed under: Internet, Security

Consumer advocates want Do Not Track anti-cookie registry

Clear Private DataYou know the federal Do Not Call registry that lets US telephone customers sign up for a list to avoid telemarketers? Two consumer advocacy groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to basically create the same kind of registry -- for the internet.

Now, let's pretend that a US agency could regulate the way that internet companies track your data for advertising and other purposes. How exactly would that work? One way would be for the the FTC would have to require every advertising firm and web site that's accessible in the US to use a potentially enormous list of consumers to figure which computers they can place cookies on and which computers they cannot.

Or the burden could be placed on consumers to sign up for a service like the Network Advertising Initiative, which places its own cookie on your computer to alert over a dozen major advertisers that you have chosen to opt-out of targeted ads. But if you happen to clean out your cookies accidentally, you'll need to reinstall the software. or if you happen across a page from a company that hasn't signed on, you could still be tracked.

We're not saying that consumers shouldn't be able to opt out of targeted advertising. We're just saying that the people asking for federal regulation seem to be either incredibly ambitious or they lack a basic understanding of how the internet works.

[via Techdirt and CNet]

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