If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable

Online Privacy

Privacy is dead, having died on our watch.

Most online content is funded by mechanisms that profile users and sell the profile data to advertisers. The Internet is controlled by a handful of corporations who couldn't care less about the concerns of individual users. We have become the merchandise.

Life Without Google

In many ways, the Internet has altered our perception of privacy and its nature. This is one of the Internet's downsides. We now spend half our lives in the real world and the other half on the Internet. The younger we are, the more our lives are lived online.

Let's think back to the times when people still lived in clay huts. Back then, people sought answers to questions from village elders, or perhaps the gods. Now, we look to Google. How can I hide my eating disorder from my parents? What are these strange lumps on my backside? Where should I hide the murder weapon? These are the kinds of things people ask Google. They tell Google things they wouldn't dare tell anyone else; asking Google is like sitting in a confessional. We send our deepest secrets, voluntarily, to a company in California—and it sells them to advertisers.

A couple of years ago, I tried to live without Google. I failed. Replacing Google search with other search engines was the easy part. I also found replacements for Google's browser and mobile operating system, but Google Ads and Analytics are used on nearly every website. YouTube is difficult to avoid, as are maps and office ...